The Creative Gene: How Books, Movies, and Music Inspired the Creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid

“[whenever] I travel and stay at a hotel I put the TV on as soon as I enter the room, just to deal with the feeling of loneliness”

As a child of working parents, Kojima wore his house key on a cord around his neck like a dog tag; it annoyed him when he did somersaults on the horizontal bar, but he wore it at all times. No one ever picked him up from school—even in rain, during a typhoon, or when he was sick—so he would unlock and enter an empty house, turn on the lights and the air conditioner or heater, and sometimes cry at his mother’s vanity or wander the streets to delay coming home.

Kojima said loneliness had accompanied him since childhood and reached its worst during his adolescence, even when he was surrounded by family, friends, school and activities. He described how a switch could flip in the middle of having fun, making the feeling stronger the more numerous the crowd was; at the end of the year, when the city was liveliest, he spent sleepless nights fearing that the loneliness might one day kill him.

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.

After Publish or Perish, Kojima began slipping away alone to the bookstore opposite the tutoring school and felt that spending time among the books meant he had entered the adult world. He awaited each monthly Columbo novelization and went to the bookstore weekly even when no new book had come out, to the point of wondering whether he was really attending the tutoring school or the shop. There he discovered Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, which opened the way to mysteries, science fiction, adventure, and his future profession.

At 43, Kojima ranked his three vital cultural nutrients as movies, music, and novels. His father loved movies, so Kojima was made to absorb films from the time he began forming memories, and music came along with those viewings; by contrast, although the family home was filled with books and his parents placed children's classics on his desk to tempt him, he still did not read even by the end of elementary school.

In 1974 Kojima attended a tutoring school in another city more for the adventure of the commute than for studying. One rainy day he took shelter in a bookstore in Ikeda, and the large cover of the novelization Columbo: Publish or Perish, which contained black-and-white photographs inside, led him to buy with his allowance the first book he had chosen out of his own interest. He used each photograph, appearing about every twenty pages, like a breath of air and read all 261 pages in one sitting.

Kojima saw his first foreign movie at age three, not in a theater but via the analog TV signal in his tatami‑matted living room thanks to Sunday Foreign Movie Theatre; he identified his first Japanese movies as the double feature Gamera vs. Barugon and Daimajin. Those Western film broadcasts came before home video, satellite, and cable.

With no VCR to pause the broadcast, Kojima, his brother and his father finished dinner and their baths before the nine o’clock showing, watched attentively without popcorn or candy, and sprinted during the commercials to be the first to get to the bathroom, sometimes following prearranged turns. Kojima did not know that Nagaharu Yodogawa’s commentaries were prerecorded and imagined the presenter was also waiting for the commercial break to go and stand at the toilet.

Kojima credited much of his film education to commentators like Nagaharu Yodogawa: their explanations made difficult or foreign films digestible, and their reassuring presence felt as if they were watching the films alongside the child. He distinguished commentators from critics with a culinary metaphor — commentators explain the ingredients and the chef before you eat, rather than dictating the taste — and concluded that, after that figure disappeared, he wanted to become an evangelist for different eras and cultures.

Having little contact with large real-life families, Kojima looked for models through television. As a child he was struck by the constant affection and kisses of the married couple in Bewitched and wanted a family like theirs; after losing his father, he admired Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie—loving, dignified, hardworking, and protective even in poverty—and moved from wishing for a father like that to wanting to become that kind of father.

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.

In 2001 Kojima went on a whim with his young son to see Crayon Shin-Chan: The Fierceness That Invites the Storm! The Adult Empire Strikes Back and became hooked on the Nohara family from Shin Chan, whose ability to band together in a crisis struck him as a new model of Japanese family. After the birth of his second son his own family grew from three to four, but he admitted he was still not the ideal father: he might have reached the level of the workaholic Hiroshi, while Charles Ingalls remained beyond his reach; he wanted his children to be inspired by their real-life family rather than by television idols.

Upon learning that Yuriko Hishimi would attend the premiere of a Mamoru Oshii film, Kojima wrote to Kenji Kamiyama pleading that he introduce him to her. Onstage at the premiere, Oshii confessed through a megaphone his own youthful love for Anne, and Kojima felt relieved, as if Oshii were speaking for him; although Kojima did not get to speak with Hishimi backstage, after forty years he saw his first love as a real woman, and at age forty-four he wrote the essay as the love letter he should have mailed forty years earlier.

Kojima bought the 2005 DVD release of Bohachi Bushido but could not finish it because seeing Yuriko Hishimi naked conflicted with the image of Anne he had built up from his childhood crush. A 1997 book, A Letter to Anne, finally allowed him to look at nude photographs and accept that the character Anne and the actress Yuriko Hishimi were part of the same first love; from that point on he began to say this openly in interviews.

Kojima placed his first love at age four in Anne Yuri, the only female member of the Ultra Guard in Ultraseven. A promotional photograph—which was not an actual scene from the episode—showed her brushing her hair unaware of an alien standing behind her; Kojima wanted to warn her, but also blushed and felt heat without understanding why. In the series finale he cried more at the thought of never seeing Anne again than at the hero’s departure or the end of the show.

Kojima said he could still draw Bakabon’s dad with his eyes closed. In junior high he filled the margins of his textbooks and notes with Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In senior high he traced Cobra on the cover so many times that the edges of the tankobon turned black from the graphite of his pencil.

Kojima admired that Yukinobu Hoshino continued to produce ambitious, art- and philosophy-driven serialized stories even after moving from a mass-circulation weekly magazine to a small monthly one. He saw himself in Hoshino because, at that time and in the shadow of the Famicom boom, Kojima was also making video games for a minor platform. Years later he continued to question whether Japanese-made games could stop placing market priority first and make the same cultural leap that manga had achieved.

As a child, Kojima avoided weekly manga magazines because he hated their cheap paper and the red, green, orange, or yellow tints; he was especially repulsed by battered, discolored, finger‑smudged copies left in barbers, eateries, and hospital waiting rooms. He preferred to wait months to buy the single‑volume editions (tankobon), which were revised, neatly bound, and intended for permanent collection, and he said he maintained that preference into upper‑middle age.

After entering the video game industry and moving to Okamoto to live alone, Kojima brought only his bed, stereo, and bicycle from home; he did not yet have a TV or air conditioning, ate all his meals outside, and on hot, lonely nights took walks to bookstores that stayed open late. In one of those stores he discovered Yukinobu Hoshino’s 2001 Nights; its art and mature science-fiction content rekindled his passion for the genre and led him to hunt through used bookstores and otaku shops for all of Hoshino’s work.

For Blade Runner’s 25th anniversary, Kojima made a personal festival: he bought the five‑DVD set, a three‑CD anniversary soundtrack, a making‑of book, and reread the novel. Although immersed in Metal Gear Solid 4, he made time to see the Final Cut; he asked for one ticket for “BlaRun” and the ticket seller did not understand the nickname. After an unusually silent exit from the screening, he found other viewers gathered in the lobby before the display photos, talking enthusiastically; sharing the film in a theater with strangers who loved it was, for him, the true Final Cut.

After leaving that screening into the warm rain of Shinjuku, Kojima saw skyscrapers and neon signs in various languages, heard sirens and foreign voices, and for a moment felt he was in the Los Angeles of 2019 imagined by Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. He said he smelled Blade Runner in the air, touched it in the city, and felt it on his skin and in the warmth of a puddle.

Kojima placed Blade Runner among his top ten favorite films and said that if he had not encountered it he would not be who he is today. He watched it in 1982, during his first year of college, alone in a conspicuously empty auditorium in Umeda; the film flattened him not so much for its plot as for the sensation of a vital future in which technology, fashion, billboards, accessories and cultures from different times and countries coexisted in harmony. He wanted to live in that city.

Kojima said he continued to pursue dreams and roman —aspirations for heroism, adventure and lofty ideals— even though they are not attainable objects, because the goal keeps a person alive. When he was about to lose them or give up, he would sing the verse about the scarlet scarf from Yamato’s ending song; then he imagined the ship sailing into the black sea of space and regained courage.

The first screening of the Yamato movie in Tokyo fell on August 7, 1977, the day of Kojima’s father’s funeral. While handling related paperwork in Umeda with his mother, Kojima bought a presale movie ticket that included a poster and put up Starsha’s image on his bedroom wall. On the day Yamato opened in Kansai he took the first train, waited for hours in the sun in a very long line, and watched probably the third showing in a packed, fetid auditorium. There, for the first time since his father’s death, he was able to process the loss of the man who loved the Yamato.

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.

Kojima always answered Joy Division when asked his favorite band and Closer when asked which album was most important. He listened to the band when life or work got him down, but also on sunny days—not to cheer up or relieve stress, but to enter their melancholy, reaffirm his place in the face of loneliness and death, and return to an inner, tranquil space he considered his bedrock.

The premiere of Control turned the city, for Kojima, into a Joy Division festival. He bought the soundtrack and Paul Smith T-shirts, several photobooks, remastered reissues, compilations and rarities; thanks to contacts at Konami’s London branch he also secured two UK-exclusive editions. Seeing posters, shops and cinemas full of the lost band felt like a day he had never imagined, and he expressed the desire to visit Ian Curtis’s grave someday.

Kojima encountered Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s death, probably around 1983, prompted by a line in the Japanese liner notes to the first Tears for Fears album. This timing coincided with the Japanese success of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” and he bought Japanese editions of Joy Division LPs and twelve-inch singles; paradoxically, he did not become genuinely interested in New Order until their album Low-Life in 1985.

Kojima described his college years as a dark period in which he could not let go of his dream of making films nor find his break, and had no one to turn to for advice or to talk to. He chose to converse through his work with two young people who had died by suicide, Ian Curtis and the writer Etsuko Takano, rather than with living people who did not understand him; he called Joy Division his silent confidant and said they helped him hang on to life and saved his life.

In 1993, seven years after joining Konami and at age thirty, Kojima was made associate general manager of Development Group 5, a team of fewer than ten people with few sales. In addition to game design he now handled personnel, administration and budgeting—tasks he was doing for the first time. When he came across Section Chief Kosaku Shima again in a bookstore, Kojima saw in that character a secret support for worries he did not want to show and for the loneliness of being caught between the organization and his work.

Kojima described his father as a chemist involved in the development of new medicines who, within the corporate structure, was nevertheless a salaryman enduring crowded trains, conflicts with coworkers and persistent fatigue while continuing to work, and who finally managed to buy a house in a Kansai suburb. In that newly created town with no shared past, families and children measured one another by academic background and job title as if playing a card game; Kojima rebelled by choosing the then-young video game industry, where he believed titles weren’t necessary and only a person’s ability mattered.

In 2008 Kojima’s business card listed “Creative Officer, Konami Digital Entertainment” and “Director, Kojima Productions.” He argued that job titles don’t hire people, don’t make anything, don’t create profits and do not endure, and that he wanted to be remembered for his deeds and his name rather than any position; he intended to spend the rest of his life on his personal mission, not a title. When exchanging business cards he introduced himself simply as Hideo Kojima, a game designer.

Kojima first discovered 2001 in 1978, in his third year of junior high, when he bought a mook—purchased for its Star Wars coverage—that also included full-color images, diagrams and interviews about Kubrick’s film. As a reader of hard SF who dreamed of becoming an astronaut, he felt more drawn to 2001 than to space-opera. While waiting for a rerelease he read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and listened to a radio-play adaptation, and he was fortunate to see the film for the first time in Cinerama in Osaka. From then on he attended every subsequent rerelease on the big screen.

Although he was Kojima’s biggest fan, he refused for years to buy 2001 on VHS, LaserDisc or DVD, believing that a work of such gigantic scale should not be paused, fast-forwarded or rewound for personal convenience. He yielded to a two-disc special edition, watched the making-of and listened to the audio commentary, and regretted it when he received explanations and interpretations from the creators; he said he did not need a talking monolith and left the DVD case closed ever since.

Kojima called 2001: A Space Odyssey his all-time number-one favorite movie and said it was the only human-made work he would choose as perfect if he had to name one. For years he consciously avoided speaking publicly about the film because it was so immense and personal to him; he regarded living without knowing it as like closing the door to one’s own evolution and future.

As a teenager, Kojima used science-fiction years—1984, 1997 and finally 2001—as future milestones that reality turned into the past. When 2001 arrived he discovered the film still belonged to the future and said his internal clock would remain stopped there until the world reached its perfection and creators managed to surpass it; for him the film was the monolith placed in the path by a god named Kubrick.

Kojima named Fujio Akatsuka as his definitive comedy mentor and the unquestionable foundation of his humor, above cinematic or stage influences. He valued that manga let him, when feeling down, laugh alone at his own pace—a small, introspective laughter that healed life’s wounds, led to the next day, and affirmed that he was alive.

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”

When asked where the sun rises, Kojima would sing the theme song of The Genius Bakabon, which incorrectly says the sun rises in the west, and he would give the opposite answer. He was attracted to the song for more than its mnemonic value: after asserting a blatant falsehood the chorus offers reassurance that everything will be all right, a rebellious spirit that sounded to him like upbeat rock music.

As a child Kojima’s family nicknamed him “Dekoppachi” because his forehead was prominent like Ataro’s younger brother; he did not entirely like the nickname but did not hate it either. He went on to draw Akatsuka’s characters everywhere, and from around third grade he drew Bakabon’s dad repeatedly—in notebooks, textbooks, his diary, on desks and on school walls; he learned to draw the character with his eyes closed, continued adding the dad to some autograph boards, and believed it was the character he had drawn more times than any other.

Although he remained attached to MiniDisc after the iPod’s release, Kojima bought a 6 GB iPod mini in 2005. For Christmas 2007 he gave his son his first iPod, a nano, and impulsively bought himself an iPod classic 120 GB, his third iPod after an iPod 5.5.

Kojima interpreted the convergence of phone, player, console and computer as a shift from the liberation of music to carrying a “walking house” that holds entertainment, data and identity. He warned that this movable shell makes it possible to isolate oneself from society anywhere and removes the pleasure of choosing a single object to take. Despite that concern, he acknowledged that he still puts in his earbuds and walks inside his own shell.

Kojima wrote that the various incarnations of the Walkman had supported him through half of his life: during heartbreak, despair, mistakes, sickness, low spirits, loss, fear of dying, pressure, stress, feelings of failure, and creative drought. He summarized that companionship as two people walking together with three legs between them.

Kojima even used the Walkman at home because he needed private music for any activity. He pushed each player so hard that, on average, he wore one out every two to three years and replaced it; along the way he also cheated on Sony with Aiwa and Panasonic.

When the first Walkman appeared, Kojima was in the first year of high school, lived in a household headed by his mother, and could not afford one. Two years later a classmate lent him a Walkman in class; on hearing "Habana Express" by Akira Terao he felt the voice inside his body, a three‑dimensional sound that enveloped him and seemed to filter into his sight, leaving him speechless, though he could only aspire to buy one someday.

When journalist Toyohiro Akiyama traveled to space in 1990 with funding from TBS and Soviet technology, Kojima realized a civilian route existed and reacted with frustration and jealousy for not having imagined it. This made him understand that he did not simply want to reach space but to train and go as an astronaut; for that reason he did not feel the same envy when game designer Richard Garriott paid about $30 million to travel to the International Space Station in 2008.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was the event that had the greatest impact on Kojima and gave him courage and hope. He also recalled the Apollo–Soyuz docking in 1975: watching on television the American and Soviet crews shake hands during the Cold War seemed to him the moment when science changed human prejudices, and he said it moved him more deeply than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Kojima abandoned the idea of becoming a professional astronaut almost upon entering senior high: Japan’s space agency had no astronauts, becoming a cosmonaut on the other side of the Iron Curtain seemed impossible, and NASA required U.S. citizenship which he was not going to change. He later judged those to be simplistic excuses to force himself to grow up; he did not abandon the desire to travel to space and, as a college student, carried Takashi Tachibana’s Return from Space in his pocket.

Kojima’s aspiration to become an astronaut turned him into an obsessive science enthusiast: he spent his meager allowance on Newton and the Japanese edition of Omni, watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and live broadcasts of space missions—which he prioritized even above his favorite movies—and studied biology, chemistry, and geology to prepare. He said he was hopeless at math and that those magazines and TV shows excited him more than Playboy or the late-night program 11PM.

In 2009 Kojima wrote that if he could have only one wish it would be to go into space before he dies. He said a brief orbit just beyond Earth’s atmosphere would be enough, and that to make it happen he would give up even his position as a game designer, his family, or his own life.

Kojima held that the deeper reason for going to space was not weightlessness, extraterrestrials, danger, or a special experience, but to find out who we are and what our place is. He described the journey to space as a journey to know oneself and the return to Earth as the passage from the past self to the future self; he concluded by asking where he himself would return as a game designer.

On seeing a newly installed mailbox in his neighborhood, Kojima pictured it as a red figure with its analog mouth open and a very hungry belly, standing there under rain and wind waiting for letters. He posted that image and the question of when he had last written or received a letter on Twitter and repeated the same message in the first essay of the My Lovable Memes series, calling the crossing of the digital tweet and the analog magazine a little piece of mischief.

Kojima proposed writing a letter even without sending it, without a stamp, without showing it to anyone, and even without a specific addressee. He thought the exercise could bring back a forgotten memory or reveal something unexpected about the writer.

Kojima defended the letter precisely because of its limitations: it is unidirectional, arrives with a delay, does not allow control over when or under what circumstances it is read, and cannot be deleted or edited after being sent. He considered that this medium, prone to misunderstandings, forces sender and receiver to move toward each other from opposite ends and strengthens empathy and the understanding of shared emotions.

Kojima said he loved the work of Teru Miyamoto and had read his novels exhaustively during his adolescence. While seeking escape in fanciful translated books, those novels helped him come to terms with his real, true-to-life self; he placed Kinshu as his favorite, followed by Haru no Yume and Ao ga Chiru.

Kojima placed Kobo Abe among the authors who influenced him most and ranked The Woman in the Dunes among his top three Abe novels alongside The Face of Another and The Box Man. He was drawn to how Abe revealed contemporary society and human nature through science fiction, fable, and metaphor; Kojima associated narrative holes with awe, fear of the unknown, and even a basic arousal.

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.

From The Woman in the Dunes, Kojima held that in life there are pits imposed on us and others we build ourselves, and that leaving one may simply lead to another. He proposed seeking a purpose within the current pit: there is freedom to leave, to stay, and to choose to live there, so the definition of freedom changes with one's thinking and point of view.

During the 2010 world tour for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Kojima was trapped with twelve other people (thirteen total) in a freight elevator at Uniqlo Soho in New York City. They managed to open the elevator doors with their bare hands and found only the metal wall of the shaft because the car had stopped between floors; as people began pounding on the cabin the smell of panic spread and there was fear of running out of oxygen, and Kojima found himself thinking of elevator movies. An hour later a rescue team evacuated them by ladder through the top of the elevator car, and they escaped without injury.

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.

Kojima’s first memory associated with an elevator is not an actual ride but a black-and-white image: when he was in preschool his father made him watch Elevator to the Gallows on television. Because there were few high-rises then and he may not yet have ridden in an elevator, the film’s immorality and mystery lodged more strongly in him than any physical memory of the device.

Kojima went with his teenage son, a Hanshin Tigers fan, to a Giants–Tigers game; Kojima drank beer and his son drank orange juice, and although Kojima was not interested in baseball he used the pauses in the game to ask about and listen to his son’s life, considering those conversations their version of a father–son game of catch.

The Giants–Tigers game ended 9–1 and Kojima’s elder son returned home silent from the loss; this time Kojima filled the walk home with stories about his own life. Afterwards he played ball for the first time in a park with his second son, who had just turned four, and he saw that summer as the simultaneous beginning of two distinct family seasons.

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.

Kojima admired that North Face shifted genres like mountain weather: what first appears to be a war movie becomes a mountaineering film, then a satire of the press, and finally a disaster movie. He emphasized a material contrast: the climbers quit the alpine infantry, assemble homemade equipment and bicycle the entire 700 kilometers because they could not afford train tickets, while the journalists arrive as tourists, dine in formal wear in an opulent heated hotel and watch through telescopes those who sleep in a tent and sip barley soup amid the storm.

North Face made Kojima want to look away and run because of the physical weight of the tragedy, but he felt he had to keep watching because it had really happened. Still, he saw that the film prepared a traverse beyond the disaster: the account of a deadly ascent ultimately became a work about love and about the person one promises to return to.

Kojima encountered North Face by chance in 2010 when he saw its trailer at an arthouse theater in Ginza. He said the film left a stronger impression on him than any other, praised its restrained camerawork, CG, and direction, and wrote that its documentary blend of humanity, nature, drama, and politics pierced his heart like a climbing piton.

Comparing his fathering to Early Autumn, Kojima admitted he could not teach his children carpentry, boxing, and cooking like Spenser. He drew from the novel that one can only teach the things one knows how to do, the world one has seen, and one’s own way of living; yet he believed that the exchange of teaching and learning broadens the future and that conveying confidence can connect children with their destiny.

Kojima recalled that, after he had stopped reading science fiction, he one day found Inherit the Stars in a bookstore and felt reunited with the science fiction of his youth. In the same essay he said the release of Moon in spring 2010 gave him a sense of déjà vu and prompted him to take James P. Hogan's novel down from his library.

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.

Kojima interpreted the new generation of science fiction writers — including Project Itoh and Tow Ubukata — as heirs to the memes of a once-dormant SF. Relating this to Inherit the Stars, he placed the answer to the novel’s theme of inheritance in the generations of readers able to receive and demonstrate those memes, rather than in the book’s celestial locations.

If he had to preserve a single Agatha Christie novel, Kojima would choose And Then There Were None. He admired that a locked-room mystery in which everyone dies could work and that its premise, its misdirections and its final twist still surprised contemporary readers.

In 2010, a display in a bookstore marking the 120th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth re-hooked Kojima and led him to reread her major novels to find out what had fascinated him as a child.

Kojima compared Christie’s novels to quiz shows and video games: brisk reads of precise length and density that focus on dilemma and deceit rather than leaving a depressive social or emotional burden. He argued that, as with action or puzzle games, readers learn her patterns with practice and engage in an intellectual contest with the author, though Christie will defeat them again if they become complacent.

Kojima ended his recommendation of And Then There Were None with a joke: he claimed there were eleven victims, not ten, because after “there were none” Christie killed another person — the reader — with her charm. He named himself as that victim and concluded that the Kojima who hated books had thus disappeared.

Kojima said that as a child he did not read and that he rejected reading without having tried it. In fifth grade he picked up Murder on the Orient Express because there was a film adaptation and he only wanted to see what the book was like; the novel struck him, sparked his curiosity, and led him to read almost all the Agatha Christie he could find before reaching middle school.

When still a student, Kojima wrote an unpublished novel titled Kodoku no Toh: on Christmas Eve a lonely college student gets drunk at a party in an automated tower near Osaka Station and wakes locked inside by its AI. After failing even by setting a fire to escape, he decides that the food, information, and entertainment of that comfortable isolation might be better than his life outside, until a year later he looks out a window and sees something strange.

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.

During a December lunch break Kojima opened Tout Seul in a Roppongi bookstore and immediately recognized his own Tower of Solitude. He hurried it back to work, locked himself in with a “no entry” placard, finished the first reading, waited exactly until the end of the workday to reread it alone in a planning suite, read it a third time to reflect, and then cried when he realized another creator had imagined a solitude very similar to the novel he had kept for nearly thirty years.

After he began writing, Kojima had no mentor, isolated himself, and nurtured a sense of superiority while producing stories that were not published. Upon entering senior high he continued writing but stopped submitting his work to competitions; he recognized in the poet Li Zheng the same mix of timid pride and disdainful shyness—that is, a fear that a lack of talent might be revealed and a rejection of the effort required to cultivate it.

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.

In high school, a line from The Moon over the Mountain left Kojima dumbstruck; until then he had boasted of reading only foreign science fiction and mysteries. He reread the story aloud in class, at home, and wherever he could until he memorized it completely; for years he proudly assumed no one else had done the same, until he later learned that the writer Koji Yanagi had also memorized it during his student days.

Kojima called the video game designer his tiger form: upon transforming into it, he said he had shed the pride and shyness that had held back his writing. He thus found another way to pass his stories to later generations, no longer as prose but as video games.

For Kojima, the image of a train is the maroon Hankyu carriage running through the mountain valleys of Kansai. From his childhood moves through cram school, regular school, leisure, dates, movies, shopping, trips, New Year’s shrine visits, trips to the airport, work, and returning home, the Hankyu network accompanied roughly half his life, and its maroon color became associated with his youth.

Kojima bought Hankyu Densha solely for its cover and title. He began reading it propelled by railway nostalgia, became caught by the book’s gentle, almost maternal wistfulness, and joked that he finished it at express-train speed.

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 had planned to dedicate his essay to a different Minato Shukawa story, but the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011 changed his choice. While looking through the heap of books that had fallen from his bookshelves he found Orgel and read it, wondering how survivors should respond and go on living after the disaster.

Through Orgel’s journey to sites tied to earthquakes, accidents, and war, Kojima argued that some losses must be seen, remembered, and listened to so the dead are not consigned to the past. After Tohoku he presented that listening as an individual responsibility: even if a meme reaches only one person, that person should receive it and pass it on to help build a bridge to the future.

As a fan of Shibumi, Kojima opened Satori, the prequel written by Don Winslow, with unease. The first two pages —a maple leaf and the recollection of killing a father-figure— dispelled his doubts; he described the prose as so visual that an opera-house assassination scene played in his mind with image and sound, like a storyboard ready to be filmed.

When Kojima was still a student who paid almost exclusive attention to Western novels, Shibumi, written by the American Trevanian, introduced him to the ancient Japanese concept of shibumi. He did not aspire merely to be a man with that suave, detached elegance, but to master it completely.

When Kojima reread Shibumi in 2006 as part of his research for Metal Gear Solid 4, he was startled by parallels with ideas he had already used: a combat discipline similar to CQC, the heightened threat perception he learned in scout/tracking training, and the merciful murder of a parental figure, which he related to Big Boss and The Boss. His reappraisal led him to recommend the novel to the development team.

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 interpreted the handover between Kamen Rider 1 and 2 as a linking of mind and soul that frees the hero from fighting alone, mirroring how readers and characters are connected from parent to child. He finished the exhibit by taking his son’s hand and stepping out toward the future with him as they compared the differently colored batons Kamen Rider had entrusted to their respective generations.

At the Kamen Rider 40th Anniversary Exhibition, Kojima photographed his son beside a modern Rider while Kojima posed next to Rider 1 and shouted the command to transform. Inside, parents and children divided by generation: Kojima became so absorbed by Ishinomori’s still-stained artist’s palette and an original manga page that he unintentionally let go of his son’s hand, and the boy went on with the younger families to the display of TV show costumes.

Kojima noted that in the manga Kamen Rider does not use the mask to hide a secret identity but to conceal the scars of his cyborg surgery, scars that reappear with rage or sorrow. He interpreted the hero as an artificial monster who faces total isolation and who draws from that solitude the purpose to fight when no one else can defend peace and nature.

Kojima recommended Darkness, Take My Hand as his choice among the six Kenzie & Gennaro novels and regarded it as a work of exceptional caliber. He said that after reading it for the first time he investigated buying the rights to adapt it into a film himself, and that in his view none of the subsequent installments surpassed Darkness.

Kojima counted himself among the fanatic followers of the Kenzie & Gennaro series who waited ten years for the return of Patrick and Angela while continuing to read Lehane’s works outside the saga. When he read Moonlight Mile as the series’ conclusion he gave Patrick, Angela and Bubba a heartfelt “Thank you!” upon finishing the last page, but instead of putting the book away he retrieved the previous volumes and reread them in order—reversing time to deny the farewell—and he still hoped he might meet them once more.

Kojima saw the Kenzie & Gennaro novels as more than a detective series: in a setting of violence, poverty, pain, and an apparent lack of a future, he cared that the characters kept struggling to live, and he considered that combination an expression of storytelling at its core.

In a September 2011 essay, Kojima wrote that each time a new Metal Gear came out he declared to the press that it would be the last he would make. He explained that all stories and all creators have an end, and that he wanted to bring his own story to its conclusion before he reached his.

Kojima explained in 2011 that he kept continuing Metal Gear because, while fans fervently wanted more, he felt the story could not end and a creator could not turn his back on them. At the same time he recognized that neither creators nor their series are eternal, a contradiction he described as a spiral in which they became trapped.

Kojima channeled his youthful destructive impulse into his work and his children, believing the era of Rock had ended. Thirty years after his first reading of Coin Locker Babies he realized the DATURA he had sought was in his own hands: he interpreted the games he released into the world as bombs loaded with memes capable of giving birth to another world and another self, and concluded the era of Rock was still alive.

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.

As a child, inspired by Motojiro Kajii’s “The Lemon,” Kojima would sneak California lemons into places he did not like and leave them there. In his imagination they were perfect grenades: he could carry them anywhere, operate them alone, and use them to blow the world apart whenever he wanted.

When he read almost exclusively science fiction, Kojima held a grudge against the world, thought a society like that deserved to be destroyed, and preferred books about apocalypse. Upon confronting reality, he changed his reading: he concluded that SF was not a tool for escapism but a medium to send warnings across national and generational boundaries into the future.

In high school, a childhood friend named Tatsuo bookmarked a passage about DATURA in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies, acted it out for Kojima, said it was “cool,” pressed the book against Kojima’s chest, and left. Kojima devoured the novel without stopping to eat or drink and described an extreme physical reaction—dizziness, pounding in his chest, nausea, and sexual arousal—caused by prose whose furious energy did not resemble images, sounds, or anything he had previously known.

In October 2011, Kojima interpreted the chain of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Tohoku as more than a natural disaster: a human failure born of scorn for nature. He maintained that a true resurrection must not simply rebuild the previous world, but choose a new, untrodden course that does not reproduce the memes of envy, hatred, and vengeance.

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.

Three pages of Umimachi Diary made Kojima cry: a girl (Suzu) cries alone for her father while the page composition isolates her with no background and then opens the framing to bring the four sisters together. Seeing how a hand on Suzu’s back and a handkerchief visually transformed solitude into belonging, Kojima thought that panel layouts were invented for that.

As his eldest son grew, Kojima stopped visiting Kamakura and likewise became too lazy to go back to Kobe; Umimachi Diary reminded him of what he had lost and what he must not forget. At the end of that summer he went to Hayama with his younger son, and from the train saw the sea where he had played with his father and where he had gone with his first son, and he decided to resume that diary of outings when the younger son is old enough.

Kojima said he had a particular fondness for true escape and survival stories and recalled rewatching The Great Escape and Papillon in theaters, as well as seeing 127 Hours. He came to Hyoryu because novelist Naoki Hyakuta had read Kojima’s essay on Papillon and recommended Hyoryu and Hagoku (Prison Break).

Kojima distinguished in Hyoryu between passive survival and regaining a human goal: returning home. He was struck that the shipwrecked men combined physical strength, artisan memory, and cooperation to make, from driftwood and remnants, things as basic as a reservoir and ultimately a ship, and that when they left they left tools and instructions for future castaways. He saw in that two meanings of survival—enduring adversity and making it back alive—and the passing on of something human beyond mere genes.

From Hyoryu, Kojima concluded that the human body needs work and movement: the castaway who balances his diet, exposes himself to the sun, and keeps active survives where others fall ill after long periods of immobility. He thought this lesson also applied to modern urban life and that an idle, purposeless existence guided only by desire is not sustainable.

When he began receiving requests to write cover blurbs and obi, Kojima concluded that a recommendation capable of luring someone toward a book also transmits memes, even if it lacks the prestige of creating the work. He stated that his own series of recommendation essays in Da Vinci would not have been possible without his prior encounters with King’s name on those obi.

Kojima explained the realism of ’Salem’s Lot as arising from an almost eccentric accumulation of details about the town, enough for the reader to accept vampires without any explanation. He also praised two montage devices: a whole day narrated by jumping between the town’s inhabitants, and a final confrontation structured as hours advancing toward sunset—a countdown that made him sweat, hold his breath, and keep turning the pages.

Kojima admitted he was not exactly a Stephen King fan and had read very few of King’s novels, yet he would buy without thinking any translated book whose obi said King praised it; he preferred Robert R. McCammon and was already a follower of Joe Hill. When a newly revised edition of ’Salem’s Lot appeared, simply seeing King’s name in large letters inside a quote on the obi made him reflexively purchase the book, even though the praise in the obi was not King’s.

Kojima joked that his aged eyes did not lessen the pleasure of I Spy because the battle is fought with the mind, not with visual acuity. Against search engines that hand you stores, movies, or books effortlessly, he defended the joy and catharsis of searching on your own and training the discernment needed to find something valuable.

Kojima bought the Christmas installment of I Spy for his son without really knowing what it was because, when he opened it, the pictures transformed his surroundings into a world of silver. Father and son became hooked, solving the riddles together almost every night, and Kojima kept buying one volume after another until, by the beginning of the next year, they had collected the entire series; he jokingly warned against shameless copycat books.

What set I Spy apart for Kojima was that searches started from word clues rather than from a pictured model: the player had to abandon a preconceived notion of how, for example, a frog should look, accept shadows, reflections and objects that are cut off at the page edge, and mentally shift the scale within a toy-like world. The books did not include answers; instead they replaced that certainty with extra challenges and prompts to invent one’s own riddles, to be played alone or with a child.

Kojima said he owns every book in the I Spy series and specifically recommended I Spy 7: Treasure Hunt and Can You See What I See? Treasure Ship. He noted that the dioramas in Treasure Ship took nine months to stage and highlighted a sequence in which each image opens the shot relative to the previous one; that filmlike technique was one reason he considered it his favorite.

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.

After searching major bookstores for Minagawa’s older works, Kojima lamented that unconventional stories set in unfamiliar countries and eras are reprinted less and sell more poorly. He argued that understanding unknown cultures, customs, places, and beliefs requires effort and stamina, and that that intellectual exposure to new worlds is where the authentic pleasure of reading lies.

Kojima recalled that twenty-five years earlier he had incorporated a story and a message into video games when both were regarded as unnecessary. With the rise of mobile games used to kill time, he saw Minagawa’s literary activity at age eighty-two as the baton to receive. He promised to continue as he is even after turning eighty and to instill his memes into video games.

Kojima continued to consult the annual guide Kono Mystery ga Sugoi not so much to find new books as to check whether the books he had chosen for himself appeared on the list. In 2012 he congratulated himself for recognizing the top entries until he came across Hiroko Minagawa, an author he had not read; this wounded his pride as a daily visitor to bookstores. After learning that Minagawa, now eighty-two, also walked inside a bookstore every day, he delightedly opened The Resurrection Fireplace and immediately proceeded to read two more of her works, Shi no Izumi (Fountain of Death) and Toritsu Suru To no Satsujin (Murder at the Upside-Down Tower).

Kojima read the shifting structure of The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie as an expression of Ágota Kristóf’s tearing between identities, borders, and languages. Noting that she wrote in French, a language she often called “an enemy language,” he asked whether the Japanese could continue to live in someone else’s tongue if they lost Japanese, which he regarded as inseparable from their identity; while writing the essay he reread all of Kristóf’s novels straight through.

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.

When Kojima reached a point in his life where he no longer trusted that he knew his own mountain or purpose, an editor at Da Vinci recommended The Summit of the Gods. The thousand pages of its two volumes made him feel cold, suffocated, and longing for the suffering to stop, but after climbing those two paper mountains alongside the characters he was able to once again face his own purpose.

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 said that making video games was his mountain: it pulled him away from his previous path and saved him. He noted that the medium was changing form, yet he resolved to keep climbing even if he had to abandon everything else—not because the mountain was already there, but precisely because it was not yet there.

Kojima admired that The City & The City did the opposite of the usual route: it began with an absurd idea—two superimposed cities whose inhabitants are trained not to see one another—and introduced enough everyday elements to make that idea feel like an ordinary fact. He first regarded it as a crime novel, then as urban fantasy, and finally as urban literature; that deliberate crossing of genres gave him chills.

In 2012, while preparing to open Kojima Productions Los Angeles, Kojima envisioned the Tokyo and LA teams not as two separate sides but as a studio located in a third space between the two cities. He wanted a global goal to render location irrelevant and for the outcome to be not merely a patchwork of Japanese memes with something American, but a creation global in the truest sense.

The scene in The Drifting Classroom where the protagonist has his appendix removed without anesthetic stayed so vividly with Kojima that every time he hears the word "appendix" he remembers the surgery and prays he never has to undergo it. He said that scene affected him more than the improvised femoral artery operation in Black Hawk Down.

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.

As a child, Kojima liked being at school when it rained. The curtain of bad weather made the building feel isolated, but beneath the fluorescent lights and surrounded by teachers and friends he did not feel lonely; he imagined the school as a spaceship in the darkness. During typhoons he fantasized that only the children in his grade were drifting and could create their own world and rules, apart from the world the adults had prepared.

What moved Kojima most about All She Was Worth was that the suspect hardly appears directly: only traces, photos and rumors remain of a woman who erased her past to keep on living. In the final confrontation he shared the detective’s absence of anger and even found himself wishing the culprit might get away; when he closed the book he felt she was still waiting and that his own hand rested on her shoulder.

Kojima placed All She Was Worth among his fifty all-time favorite books and called it his favorite work by Miyuki Miyabe. Twenty years after its publication, he linked its depiction of a daily hell of credit and debt to new forms of economic dematerialization; in 2012 he pointed to the complete gacha controversy in social games as a possible warning sign of another predatory machinery.

Shadow 81 changed the distance Kojima kept from stories in which the criminal occupies the noble side. He found it refreshing that the kidnapping did not spill blood and operated like an intellectual, mathematical con; the ending gave him satisfaction and engendered sympathy for the culprits that was detached from any grand ideological cause.

While writing the essay, Kojima placed side by side the fourth printing of the second edition of Shadow 81 and a finger-marked Shinchosha first edition, reobtained used. He even compared the altitude and angle of the silhouetted aircraft on both covers, imagining the plane still flew above his head.

Kojima discovered Shadow 81 while in his second year of junior high when a faceup stack of the foreign genre novel stood out in Shinchosha’s new-release section; he associated Shinchosha with serious classics and the publisher’s tactfully elegant cover completed the attraction. Thirty-five years later he reread the book and, on a Hayakawa reprint, found his own obi endorsement: he described the novel as his absolute favorite and said he had never seen a plot that surpassed it.

For Kojima, Jennie simultaneously occupies the roles of lover, teacher, rival, partner, and confidante. He read the novel as more than a moral tale about a bittersweet first love and loss: a story about living, told from a feminine point of view, and about how to pass the baton (his "memes") to the next generation.

Kojima closed his essay by imagining his adolescent reading of Jennie as a dream in which he met a cat. An adult rereading made him realize he had never forgotten that experience and led him to correct his initial claim that he had never had a cat: in an intimate sense he had had Jennie and continued to carry her meme inside him.

Thirty-three years after his youthful reading, Kojima took Jennie from his bookshelf again. Upon rereading it he discovered that the cat had influenced not only his view of women but also his creative work.

Kojima said he entered high school unable to tell dogs from cats because he had never had either as a pet; not for lack of wanting one, but because his mother suffered from asthma. In his first summer of high school he picked Jennie by Paul Gallico despite not being a cat lover, and he suspected the title might have reminded him of Jaime Sommers from The Bionic Woman.

Kojima attributed Jennie as a subconscious inspiration for The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. He framed the opposition of Snake as a stray dog and The Boss as a mother cat in terms of his intention to introduce motherhood and the point of view of stray cats into a saga he had until then regarded as a story of parricide led by war dogs.

Kojima described Satoshi Itoh as one of the fans who most deeply understood his works, to the point Itoh became known as a “Kojima fundamentalist.” After Itoh’s literary debut as Project Itoh they became friends and respected each other as creators with similar tastes; Itoh’s death in the spring of 2009 made Kojima feel he had lost both a recipient of his memes and a precious son.

According to the book’s capsule, Project Itoh was hospitalized immediately after the meeting to plan the Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots novelization and wrote the entire manuscript from his hospital bed. He identified with Otacon and Raiden, chose Otacon as the narrator to project himself into the novel, and built the rest of the work from that decision.

One and a half years before Project Itoh’s death, Kojima commissioned Itoh to write the novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4—not to make use of an up-and-coming author, but so that another bearer of his memes would connect the video game’s story to a different medium. Kojima considered that Itoh did not merely trace the game’s plot and scenes: he transformed the material into a work of his own that could convey Kojima’s ideas even to readers unfamiliar with the game; Kojima described it as not novelized but Itoh-ized.

As he approached fifty, Kojima acknowledged that studio work was already physically fatiguing and that he should be preparing a successor and retirement, but the person to whom he had handed the baton had died before him. He said he could only pick up Itoh’s last wishes and continue telling stories; he also began the series My Lovable Memes after Itoh’s death to search for new receivers.

“In Death Stranding, 'strand' stands for strings and connections, and I felt a mysterious connection to that song that I found in that CD shop in Reykjavík two years ago.”

“I’m back”

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 linked the speed and quality of his work to teams small enough to let him walk through the studio, spot problems where they arise, and give directions directly. He compared that method to visiting bookstores: solutions do not come from an automatic search, but from his own judgment, which he must keep refining with his eyes, head, and body.

Kojima argued that stories about impossible journeys can circulate through culture and help turn them into reality. In response to accusations of escapism, he maintained that fiction contains truth and can serve as a frontline tool to correct real-world problems; for that reason he wants to continue telling stories and creating connections between people, worlds, and times.

Before becoming a designer, Kojima turned to stories as a compass when he doubted his future: experiencing unfamiliar times and places expanded his world and refined his outlook. When he was able to make a living from creating, he changed his relationship with stories and began thinking about how to connect his works with players and the world; he said he wanted to push those who were standing still, help them move forward, and make the world better.

Kojima admitted that analyzing past successes can produce a sellable, low-risk product, but he rejected that method because tomorrow always arrives and what was accepted yesterday does not remain the same. He held that past experiences are necessary not to imitate but to connect differently; therefore he reads, watches movies, listens to music, visits museums, and meets people as a practice to learn from history and create the future.

Kojima says one must live with one’s receptive antennae out and scanning in all directions, an exhausting attention to diverse stimuli. His process is to hold onto what sparks interest, turn it over in the mind, shape it, and bring it out into the world; the same material absorbed can reappear as an essay, lyrics, sound, performance, or a video game depending on the medium and the creator’s technique.

Kojima said he wants to make music because, deep down, he wants to do everything himself, but he cannot get anything to come out. He sometimes thinks he has composed a melody when singing to himself and later discovers, to his disappointment, that it was a song he had already heard.

Kojima designed the online relationships in Death Stranding so players do not meet directly but leave objects and “likes.” He gave the example of finding on a path a musical device abandoned by someone else: it only lets you infer that they liked that song, yet it turns a solitary walk into one that reveals another presence. In contrast to the frontal dialogue of social media, he wanted a cushioned connection that forces the player to imagine who was there and what they were thinking.

Kojima explained an optional encounter in Death Stranding in which Sam periodically delivers medicine to a man who has no direct importance to the main plot. If the player forgets to continue bringing the medicine, the man will die. With that mechanic Kojima wanted players to experience that forming a connection also means taking on responsibility, and that their actions can both build and break that connection.

Before the release, Kojima compared playing Death Stranding to climbing Mt. Fuji alone: the effort can lead someone to question why they continue and to give up, but reaching the summit and seeing the sunrise validates the difficulty and can make them cry. He noted that someone who turns back before the summit does not reach that emotion.

Kojima stated that creating the new company was more difficult than developing Death Stranding: upon becoming independent he had to recover credibility, financing, people and a place to work. Fans of his earlier games helped him in unforeseen ways, and he was able to deal directly with Hollywood actors who appreciated Metal Gear and wanted to participate out of mutual affinity.

Gen Hoshino said he admires that Kojima takes a very specific humorous detail—one that might otherwise end as a laugh during a meeting—and has the conviction to make it part of the game and share the joke with the player. Encountering that humor in Kojima’s work reminds Hoshino that if he wants to make an interesting idea real, he must not give up on it.

Kojima said he never runs out of things he wants to do because technology keeps advancing and ideas come to him effortlessly. Although his team sometimes puts the brakes on proposals for having no precedent, he maintained that almost nothing is impossible; he added the inverse limit that if he himself perceives an idea will not be interesting, he must stop it even when it is already highly developed.

When testing Metal Gear’s initial concept—hiding and escaping from enemies—Kojima considered it essential to distinguish two failures: that the idea wasn’t properly realized in the game, or that the idea itself wasn’t fun. In the second case he would have canceled the game; handing that decision over to marketing would have removed his ability to turn back and resulted in a typical video game.

VIZ's biographical note places Kojima's birth in Tokyo in 1963, his directorial debut with Metal Gear in 1987, the establishment of his independent studio Kojima Productions at the end of 2015, and the release of Death Stranding in 2019.

To launch Kojima Productions after going independent in December 2015, Kojima rented an office of under nine square meters and conducted an international search for staff, software tools, and engines while the studio began production on a new game.

Kojima explains that always following the same fixed route through a bookstore is efficient but causes him to stop seeing what lies outside it. Visiting a new or less familiar bookstore disorients him and disrupts his ossified patterns of thought; even the same books can show a different side depending on the store’s size, environment, and arrangement.

Kojima says that going to a bookstore was a daily routine he did not abandon even during the frenetic start of his studio. There he takes books in his hands, buys the ones that call to him, and loses himself reading them; on business trips he is not at ease unless he has several books in his bag, and he considers choosing and reading books to be part of who he is.

Kojima recalls that, as a child, he was the first to come home alone: turning on the lights was his duty and opening a book in solitude became his routine. He says books kept the feelings of isolation and loneliness from crushing him, and that after his father’s early death he found within books adults and teachers who served as guides and role models.

Kojima keeps the purchase receipt inside nearly every book on his shelves. The receipt, printed with the store’s name and the date and time, brings back not only the book’s content but also what he experienced before going to the bookstore, where he read it, and the imprint the story left; even a boring book becomes associated with a memory he considers uniquely his.

“As soon as I got home, I turned on every light in every room and switched on the TV at high volume—not to watch anything, but to distract from the loneliness.”

“...my dad couldn't answer. He just kept looking at me through convulsions. His eyes looked like they were trying to tell me something...”

“I bought the second generation Walkman in college. ... Looking at the views with music on was like having a soundtrack. ... iPod was released, and I moved to digital. Meanwhile, Sony released their digital Walkman.”