Kojima discovered Shadow 81 while in his second year of junior high…

While writing the essay, Kojima placed side by side the fourth printing of the second edition of Shadow 81 and a finger-marked Shinchosha first edition, reobtained used. He even compared the altitude and angle of the silhouetted aircraft on both covers, imagining the plane still flew above his head.

In 1974 Kojima attended a tutoring school in another city more for the adventure of the commute than for studying. One rainy day he took shelter in a bookstore in Ikeda, and the large cover of the novelization Columbo: Publish or Perish, which contained black-and-white photographs inside, led him to buy with his allowance the first book he had chosen out of his own interest. He used each photograph, appearing about every twenty pages, like a breath of air and read all 261 pages in one sitting.

Shadow 81 changed the distance Kojima kept from stories in which the criminal occupies the noble side. He found it refreshing that the kidnapping did not spill blood and operated like an intellectual, mathematical con; the ending gave him satisfaction and engendered sympathy for the culprits that was detached from any grand ideological cause.

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 placed his awakening to reading in fifth grade, when he plunged into mystery novels from around the world. He continued with them through sixth grade, and upon finishing elementary school he moved on to science fiction, which he described as his companion until college; from that period he barely remembers reading anything else.