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.
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.
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.
“The book includes a selection from "70% of My Body Is Made of Movies," which was published years ago by Sony Magazines, film critiques I wrote for Bunshun Online after becoming independent, novel afterwords and contributions, a collection of comments from 'Hideo's Mysteries,' travel essays serialized in the Nikkei Sunday edition newspaper, and essays about Kōbō Abe, among others.”
Kojima bought Hankyu Densha solely for its cover and title. He began reading it propelled by railway nostalgia, became caught by the book’s gentle, almost maternal wistfulness, and joked that he finished it at express-train speed.
When Kojima reread Shibumi in 2006 as part of his research for Metal Gear Solid 4, he was startled by parallels with ideas he had already used: a combat discipline similar to CQC, the heightened threat perception he learned in scout/tracking training, and the merciful murder of a parental figure, which he related to Big Boss and The Boss. His reappraisal led him to recommend the novel to the development team.