“■ BOOK ・ 地下室の手記 ドストエフスキー 光文社” JA Original quote in Japanese; the summary below carries the meaning.
In his blog entry of July 3, 2007, Kojima listed in the books section Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, the Kobunsha edition.
The day before Sakyo Komatsu’s death, Kojima saw Japan Sinks on a special display in a bookstore and bought it; he felt a sense of fate because an earthquake had forced the public to rediscover the author. Seeking to understand what Komatsu might have felt about Tohoku, Kojima reacquired several of Komatsu’s works, and an adult rereading of Virus superimposed a scene of skeletons in Tokyo Bay with 3/11 in his mind and moved him to tears.
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 keeps the purchase receipt inside nearly every book on his shelves. The receipt, printed with the store’s name and the date and time, brings back not only the book’s content but also what he experienced before going to the bookstore, where he read it, and the imprint the story left; even a boring book becomes associated with a memory he considers uniquely his.
Kojima placed Kobo Abe among the authors who influenced him most and ranked The Woman in the Dunes among his top three Abe novels alongside The Face of Another and The Box Man. He was drawn to how Abe revealed contemporary society and human nature through science fiction, fable, and metaphor; Kojima associated narrative holes with awe, fear of the unknown, and even a basic arousal.
When Kojima reached a point in his life where he no longer trusted that he knew his own mountain or purpose, an editor at Da Vinci recommended The Summit of the Gods. The thousand pages of its two volumes made him feel cold, suffocated, and longing for the suffering to stop, but after climbing those two paper mountains alongside the characters he was able to once again face his own purpose.