After searching major bookstores for Minagawa’s older works, Kojima…

“Of course, the reading part is fun too, but picking out the books, therein lies the fun.”

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 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.

“So, it's all about just how many I can come across in my short life. That's why I go to the bookstore.”

Kojima explains that always following the same fixed route through a bookstore is efficient but causes him to stop seeing what lies outside it. Visiting a new or less familiar bookstore disorients him and disrupts his ossified patterns of thought; even the same books can show a different side depending on the store’s size, environment, and arrangement.