As his eldest son grew, Kojima stopped visiting Kamakura and likewise…

“There was a period, before my Father died, where I thought I'd become an artist, but my Father died very suddenly when I was 13. My family was full of artists, you see, and they hadn't been able to make a living off of it.”

Kojima lived near the sea in Tsujido until he was three, and after returning to the nearby Tokyo area in 1996 he took his eldest son many times to the coastal towns of his memories. On one route in Enoshima they saw fish, ate rice with seafood and manju buns, rode the ESCAR toll escalator—which Kojima called a rip-off—returned by ferry and ended the day in a café: Kojima drank coffee, the boy had juice, and Southern All-Stars songs played in the background.

Kojima recalled that when his son was small they did all kinds of activities and trips together, but that abruptly ended when his son started junior high and preferred to be with his friends. Since Kojima's own father died when he was thirteen and he had no experience of going through adolescence with a father, he said he did not know what closeness or distance to adopt with his son; he sought guidance by rereading Early Autumn.

In February 2011, Kojima detoured from a business trip to visit his father’s grave near his old house and rode the Hankyu Railway for the first time in a year. He did not know anyone on the train; the view outside had changed greatly since he had lived there and the train car’s interior had been modernized, but the cozy, cradle-like sway felt nostalgic. He described the Hankyu not merely as transportation but as a time machine to his hometown and his memories.

Kojima spent thirty-five years wondering what his father had been trying to tell him with his look before dying. Reading Hoshiyadori no Koe made him understand that he had not lost his father completely: he carried his father’s voice inside him and heard it as an instruction to look after others. He connected that revelation to a future moment when he himself would pass his memes to his children and they would understand his look.