The first screening of the Yamato movie in Tokyo fell on August 7,…

Kojima regarded the primary family form as a unit of four: his parents, his brother two years older, and himself. After moving from Tokyo toward Kansai, his parents built a house in 1970 in a new development in Hyogo, distant from grandparents and other relatives; Kojima’s father presented that house as where they were starting and from which their children could also begin. They did not have the typical suburban dog because Kojima’s mother had asthma.

Kojima's father, who had survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid and as a boy had wanted to join the navy, drank and built model ships; the family's bathroom "dry dock" held many wrecked Yamato models. Seeing the title on the TV listings, he forced Hideo to watch the premiere broadcast of Space Battleship Yamato on October 6, 1974, but the boy found it boring and from the following week secretly switched the channel to Army of the Apes; only the reruns shown at dinnertime later turned him into a fan.

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.

After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.

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.