Kojima described his college years as a dark period in which he could…

Kojima always answered Joy Division when asked his favorite band and Closer when asked which album was most important. He listened to the band when life or work got him down, but also on sunny days—not to cheer up or relieve stress, but to enter their melancholy, reaffirm his place in the face of loneliness and death, and return to an inner, tranquil space he considered his bedrock.

“But when I was alone, I would hold my knees and listen to music and cry.”

Kojima said loneliness had accompanied him since childhood and reached its worst during his adolescence, even when he was surrounded by family, friends, school and activities. He described how a switch could flip in the middle of having fun, making the feeling stronger the more numerous the crowd was; at the end of the year, when the city was liveliest, he spent sleepless nights fearing that the loneliness might one day kill him.

Kojima encountered Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s death, probably around 1983, prompted by a line in the Japanese liner notes to the first Tears for Fears album. This timing coincided with the Japanese success of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” and he bought Japanese editions of Joy Division LPs and twelve-inch singles; paradoxically, he did not become genuinely interested in New Order until their album Low-Life in 1985.

Kojima recalled that when his son was small they did all kinds of activities and trips together, but that abruptly ended when his son started junior high and preferred to be with his friends. Since Kojima's own father died when he was thirteen and he had no experience of going through adolescence with a father, he said he did not know what closeness or distance to adopt with his son; he sought guidance by rereading Early Autumn.