Kojima placed Kobo Abe among the authors who influenced him most and…

Kojima recalled an idea he attributed to Ryu Murakami: that every story presents a protagonist who falls into a hole and either crawls out or dies inside. He found it applicable to nearly all tales, but saw in The Woman in the Dunes a third possibility that revealed Abe’s genius: the protagonist finds a life inside the hole.

Kojima said he loved the work of Teru Miyamoto and had read his novels exhaustively during his adolescence. While seeking escape in fanciful translated books, those novels helped him come to terms with his real, true-to-life self; he placed Kinshu as his favorite, followed by Haru no Yume and Ao ga Chiru.

Kojima continued to consult the annual guide Kono Mystery ga Sugoi not so much to find new books as to check whether the books he had chosen for himself appeared on the list. In 2012 he congratulated himself for recognizing the top entries until he came across Hiroko Minagawa, an author he had not read; this wounded his pride as a daily visitor to bookstores. After learning that Minagawa, now eighty-two, also walked inside a bookstore every day, he delightedly opened The Resurrection Fireplace and immediately proceeded to read two more of her works, Shi no Izumi (Fountain of Death) and Toritsu Suru To no Satsujin (Murder at the Upside-Down Tower).

Kojima placed All She Was Worth among his fifty all-time favorite books and called it his favorite work by Miyuki Miyabe. Twenty years after its publication, he linked its depiction of a daily hell of credit and debt to new forms of economic dematerialization; in 2012 he pointed to the complete gacha controversy in social games as a possible warning sign of another predatory machinery.

From The Woman in the Dunes, Kojima held that in life there are pits imposed on us and others we build ourselves, and that leaving one may simply lead to another. He proposed seeking a purpose within the current pit: there is freedom to leave, to stay, and to choose to live there, so the definition of freedom changes with one's thinking and point of view.