In high school, a childhood friend named Tatsuo bookmarked a passage…

Kojima channeled his youthful destructive impulse into his work and his children, believing the era of Rock had ended. Thirty years after his first reading of Coin Locker Babies he realized the DATURA he had sought was in his own hands: he interpreted the games he released into the world as bombs loaded with memes capable of giving birth to another world and another self, and concluded the era of Rock was still alive.

“this is exactly the kind of thing I have always wanted to create. Not a game merely played to "pass the time", but something that would be important to one's own life experience.”

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.

“Every time our eyes met, I thought I had to buy something, and that, for me, was a science fiction book.”

When still a student, Kojima wrote an unpublished novel titled Kodoku no Toh: on Christmas Eve a lonely college student gets drunk at a party in an automated tower near Osaka Station and wakes locked inside by its AI. After failing even by setting a fire to escape, he decides that the food, information, and entertainment of that comfortable isolation might be better than his life outside, until a year later he looks out a window and sees something strange.