Kojima said he entered high school unable to tell dogs from cats…

Kojima closed his essay by imagining his adolescent reading of Jennie as a dream in which he met a cat. An adult rereading made him realize he had never forgotten that experience and led him to correct his initial claim that he had never had a cat: in an intimate sense he had had Jennie and continued to carry her meme inside him.

Thirty-three years after his youthful reading, Kojima took Jennie from his bookshelf again. Upon rereading it he discovered that the cat had influenced not only his view of women but also his creative work.

Kojima attributed Jennie as a subconscious inspiration for The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. He framed the opposition of Snake as a stray dog and The Boss as a mother cat in terms of his intention to introduce motherhood and the point of view of stray cats into a saga he had until then regarded as a story of parricide led by war dogs.

For Kojima, Jennie simultaneously occupies the roles of lover, teacher, rival, partner, and confidante. He read the novel as more than a moral tale about a bittersweet first love and loss: a story about living, told from a feminine point of view, and about how to pass the baton (his "memes") to the next generation.

Kojima placed his awakening to reading in fifth grade, when he plunged into mystery novels from around the world. He continued with them through sixth grade, and upon finishing elementary school he moved on to science fiction, which he described as his companion until college; from that period he barely remembers reading anything else.