After he began writing, Kojima had no mentor, isolated himself, and…

During his creative work, Kojima said he sometimes suffers intense feelings of isolation, stress, and doubt. He is saved by knowing that writers, directors, artists, or other people committed to creating connections exist; their struggles become stories that relieve his loneliness. Likewise, an extraordinary work produced in a faraway country shows him that he can still keep trying.

Kojima placed the start of his deliberate narrative writing in junior high, when a teacher assigned converting a few lines of kanbun into modern Japanese and expanding them into a story. He reinterpreted those lines into roughly ten pages, received special praise from the teacher in front of the class, and shifted from merely documenting plots like movie synopses to trying to write real narratives.

“But when I was alone, I would hold my knees and listen to music and cry.”

At a USC talk in 2011, Kojima said he began writing as a young man and that one of his early pieces was a long story titled Survival Battle, set in a world where everyone fought when they turned fourteen and earned extra time in their lifespan for each victory.

Kojima placed his awakening to reading in fifth grade, when he plunged into mystery novels from around the world. He continued with them through sixth grade, and upon finishing elementary school he moved on to science fiction, which he described as his companion until college; from that period he barely remembers reading anything else.