From The Woman in the Dunes, Kojima held that in life there are pits…

Kojima recalled an idea he attributed to Ryu Murakami: that every story presents a protagonist who falls into a hole and either crawls out or dies inside. He found it applicable to nearly all tales, but saw in The Woman in the Dunes a third possibility that revealed Abe’s genius: the protagonist finds a life inside the hole.

After the Tohoku earthquake, fans and associates from around the world advised Kojima to leave Japan and use his life and resources to create elsewhere rather than spend them rebuilding the past. Kojima did not leave: he realized he could not separate his own purpose from Japan’s reconstruction and that, despite considering himself cosmopolitan, his substance was innately Japanese. Satori helped him out of the standstill with a further conclusion: he should not confine himself to Eastern, Western, or national labels, but create and share his own world—the world of Hideo Kojima.

Kojima began by identifying with the climber Joji Habu, who selects dangerous, untried routes and turns into reality what no one else has done. However, the cameraman Makoto Fukamachi’s monologue shook him: Kojima recognized that his older self was no longer the pioneering leader but the one who follows behind, returns alive, and goes back to the mountain again and again because it is all he can do.

Kojima recognized in himself a tendency to seek isolation, but Tout Seul made him realize he had not even taken the first step to leave his tower. Knowing that elsewhere there were people who shared the same loneliness taught him to address his own not by fighting the outside world but by parting with the comfort of being alone; when lonely people gather, he said, the word solitude disappears.

Kojima contrasted The Drifting Classroom with survival stories that end with a return home. His children begin wanting to go back, but accept that they cannot and see themselves as seeds scattered into the future; after Tohoku, Kojima viewed that drifting away from the previous era as a possible new way of living to preserve the future.