Kojima placed the start of his deliberate narrative writing in junior…

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.

After he began writing, Kojima had no mentor, isolated himself, and nurtured a sense of superiority while producing stories that were not published. Upon entering senior high he continued writing but stopped submitting his work to competitions; he recognized in the poet Li Zheng the same mix of timid pride and disdainful shyness—that is, a fear that a lack of talent might be revealed and a rejection of the effort required to cultivate it.

At a USC talk in 2011, Kojima said he began writing as a young man and that one of his early pieces was a long story titled Survival Battle, set in a world where everyone fought when they turned fourteen and earned extra time in their lifespan for each victory.

According to the Newsweek profile of him in 2001, Kojima wrote in middle school five 600-page science-fiction novels.

“Ever since middle school or thereabouts, for the longest time, I had wanted to make movies.”