Kojima read the shifting structure of The Notebook, The Proof and The…

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.

Kojima finished reading Thomas Knüwer’s “Das Haus in dem Gudelia stirbt” (“The House Where Gudelia Dies”). He described it as a German mystery about Gudelia, a lonely 81-year-old woman who narrates in the first person the sad past behind her attachment to a house, in a story moving between 2024, 1998, and 1984 whose present-day events unfold during a devastating flood. He said it is not the kind of mystery that begins with a dead body and proceeds through an investigation by a detective or police officer; he said that from around the middle it makes the reader reluctant to learn the answer to what happened and that, rather than being a whodunit, it goes deeper into both the human side of the story and the mystery itself. He recommended it.

Kojima finished reading Eric Heisserer’s “Simultaneous” during the flight. He explained that the novel begins with reincarnation and past-life regression before becoming intertwined with a series of murders, and identified its distinctive concept of “simultaneous lives,” in which multiple people in the same generation share a single soul. He said the novel is driven less by its lore or world-building than by its cinematic, Nolan-esque narrative momentum, and also feels cinematic because the threat of an unknown serial killer is confronted by an investigator, a counselor, and an ordinary patient rather than by a vast government conspiracy or institution.

“If anybody who is writing a novel reads this, they will probably give up writing. They'll be like, there's no way I can compete with this.”

In high school, a line from The Moon over the Mountain left Kojima dumbstruck; until then he had boasted of reading only foreign science fiction and mysteries. He reread the story aloud in class, at home, and wherever he could until he memorized it completely; for years he proudly assumed no one else had done the same, until he later learned that the writer Koji Yanagi had also memorized it during his student days.