As a child, Kojima avoided weekly manga magazines because he hated…

“Every time I went, there were less and less books available. And then I realized it was because I was buying all the books.”

Kojima admired that Yukinobu Hoshino continued to produce ambitious, art- and philosophy-driven serialized stories even after moving from a mass-circulation weekly magazine to a small monthly one. He saw himself in Hoshino because, at that time and in the shadow of the Famicom boom, Kojima was also making video games for a minor platform. Years later he continued to question whether Japanese-made games could stop placing market priority first and make the same cultural leap that manga had achieved.

Kojima said he could still draw Bakabon’s dad with his eyes closed. In junior high he filled the margins of his textbooks and notes with Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In senior high he traced Cobra on the cover so many times that the edges of the tankobon turned black from the graphite of his pencil.

Kojima found a new edition of Seicho Matsumoto’s “Amsterdam Unga Satsujin Jiken” at a bookstore and picked it up. He called it a nostalgic find and remembered reading the Kappa Novels edition as a child, borrowing the copy his mother was reading.

Kojima discovered Shadow 81 while in his second year of junior high when a faceup stack of the foreign genre novel stood out in Shinchosha’s new-release section; he associated Shinchosha with serious classics and the publisher’s tactfully elegant cover completed the attraction. Thirty-five years later he reread the book and, on a Hayakawa reprint, found his own obi endorsement: he described the novel as his absolute favorite and said he had never seen a plot that surpassed it.