It resonated with me, given the loneliness that troubled me in my…

“Travis [Bickle] was the same as me in a way. I'm Japanese; I thought every American guy never even felt solitude. So this was new to me. When I saw Taxi Driver, I was surprised but I empathized. I felt relieved.”

Taxi Driver did not teach Kojima to defeat his loneliness but to live with it, because it showed him that someone else could feel the same way. Decades later he believed that that emotional sickness had vanished around the birth of his first child and when he began making video games: upon realizing his works connected him with faceless, nameless players around the world, the loneliness fell away definitively.

Every time Kojima got into a taxi, he looked at the driver’s name on their ID as if somewhere he were still searching for Travis Bickle. He never found that name in real life, but he wished that someday he could sit in the rear seat and thank Travis Bickle because, unlike the movie’s rescue of fourteen-year-old Iris, Travis had pulled Kojima out of his isolation.

“I was roaming in the dark and you were like the beacon of light leading the way with your smile and everything.”

“Well, I'm not an actor, so I'm just kind of there for presents. […] I've played the role of an assassin before too.”