solitude

“They may be entirely fictional, but somewhere in me the illusion persists that they are alive and real.”

“I grew up in the countryside myself, so I used to love the commotion of the city… the rust, the crowded roadsides, the electric wires. I loved all that. But after I turned 30 or so, it started to get a little tiresome…”

“not being able to program, I had a very hard time making Metal Gear. As a planner you write what you want in the planning documents, and convey your image as best you can, but ultimately it comes down to the programmers' sensibilities.”

“In my generation, we didn't have good role models; no one taught us anything. [...] That's why we ended up learning a lot from movies and manga. For the current generation, I think games are fulfilling a similar role. [...] People tell me all the time that my games are too "preachy", but I don't like games that have nothing to teach. (laughs)”

“I would like to go. Not to Mars, but to the surface of the moon. Just getting out of Earth's orbit, and seeing our Earth from up there… I could die happy. Seriously, I wouldn't care if I couldn't come back.”

“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.”

“[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”

“I've said over the years in interviews throughout the world, "Just like the human body is 70% water, I'm 70% film". While this is a figure of speech, there is some truth to it. I learned, or rather was taught, much from film, including things I didn't learn in school or from my parents.”

“It resonated with me, given the loneliness that troubled me in my younger days, which is why it has a very special place in my heart. After I saw it I bought a jacket and a pair of boots to copy Robert De Niro. Needless to say, I did not get a mohawk.”

“This was the first film I went to see at a movie theater by myself, at the OS Theater in Osaka. I have a lot of memories of this film.”

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.

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.

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.

In his blog entry of July 3, 2007, Kojima listed in the books section Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, the Kobunsha edition.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

“only oddball in my class that wanted to make movies or novels”

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“I've been stuck with something of a father complex ever since. All the Metal Gear games so far have been paternal stories. They're all about killing your father (laughs).”

“I think what happened to Hideo Kojima last year was a tragedy, but he never complained. He just sat in an isolated room for months, looked inside himself and focused on his art.”

“couldn't even talk to them – he had to talk through someone else. That's how that game was finished.”

“I've been away from Twitter as my mother passed away recently but I feel like start tweeting again.”

“I feel always lonely in society”

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.

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 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.

“Even when I went to the bank, I couldn't borrow money. They said, 'We know you're renowned, but you don't have any actual results.'”

“Of course I have my sons, to whom I'm connected, but I can't really rely on anyone, actually. That's why I'm creating things, because I can't rely on people, in a way.”

“Everyone thinks I do crazy stuff, but I'm sensitive. I lost my father when I was really young. I couldn't really speak to my dad. I had to say: believe in yourself, and do what you believe. That's how I lived and who I am today.”

“Everyone has [trauma], whether they say it or not. I'm not saying: go over your trauma, but I think people should look at it as their individualism as well. You don't need to be embarrassed. I hope I can encourage people with trauma to be brave and just go on”

“I thought, I'll tell her once I've become a little successful. I didn't want her to worry.”

“That's why I added this indirect online connection in the game — so that people will feel it's alright, it's okay. You're relieved that you're not alone. You see other people's footprints and think it's not just me here.”

“Travis [Bickle] was the same as me in a way. I'm Japanese; I thought every American guy never even felt solitude. So this was new to me. When I saw Taxi Driver, I was surprised but I empathized. I felt relieved.”

“I felt lonely when I was talking to my friends because they couldn't understand. I wanted to go home … and turn on the lights because I was frightened. I had so many friends at school, but was lonely. I didn't tell anyone. I thought I was sick.”

“Me as an old man going to the theater by myself on this day? I changed my plan to stay in my office working on my next concept.”

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.

“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...”

“You can't show them the inside of your brain. You draw pictures and try to put it into words. But you can't show them in moving pictures.”

“Way back in 2005, I did my own podcast, Hidechan! Radio, for a long time. I grew up in the generation of radio and after I became a creator, I wanted to give something back to the medium that was there for me when I was a lonely kid.”

“Every time I went, there were less and less books available. And then I realized it was because I was buying all the books.”

“There really won't be another person like him, epitomizing loneliness in his compositions. I think that's what it comes down to.”

“In 2021, my staff was still working from home because of the pandemic, so I was the only one coming to the office. I would listen to that album while working.”

“The player is the only one making the connections, so the sense of loneliness is torturous at the start.”

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

“It became a habit which I still have. ... I'd think up stories because I had so much time alone.”

“Every time our eyes met, I thought I had to buy something, and that, for me, was a science fiction book.”

“As I reflect on that time, maybe it was my escape from reality.”

“I had the story written before the pandemic, but after experiencing the pandemic I just rewrote the whole story from scratch. I also didn't want to predict any more future, so I rewrote it.”

Kojima describes the family house in Kawanishi (Hyogo) where he lived from fifth grade: his room and his brother’s were symmetrical, separated by a sliding door, with identical beds facing each other, and when they slept they could hear each other’s breathing and even what they said in their dreams. After dinner, the bath and the living-room TV were finished, the children would shut themselves in their room and turn on the radiocassette; as a result he developed the habit of lying on his bed and listening to the radio.

“Music accounts for 80% of what moves people emotionally. I hope that the songs, whether they are songs that play in moments of solitude or ones that evoke cinematic spectacle, I hope that they will touch your hearts.”

“I gave a USB stick with all my ideas on it to my personal assistant, kind of like a will.”

“I thought that I could never recover. I felt like I might not ever be able to create a game again.”

“we've actually never spoken together. [I] don't speak Japanese and Hideo doesn't speak English. So, we communicate through music and images, through emotions rather than words”

“It's almost like a disease. I'm imagining things all the time. Even when I'm talking to my family, in my head I'm in a totally different world.”

“The first one I bought myself was for "The Towering Inferno." ... he said "Hideo, you don't need it. I've already got one." I didn't want to share it, and it made me angry ... So, I stopped going to the movies with my brother. I went alone and bought the pamphlet by myself.”

At the Il Cinema in Piazza festival in Rome, Kojima said he has always thought he wants to die in a movie theater, specifically at the moment just before the film begins, after the trailers and commercials have played.

Kojima finished reading Thomas Knüwer’s “Das Haus in dem Gudelia stirbt” (“The House Where Gudelia Dies”). He described it as a German mystery about Gudelia, a lonely 81-year-old woman who narrates in the first person the sad past behind her attachment to a house, in a story moving between 2024, 1998, and 1984 whose present-day events unfold during a devastating flood. He said it is not the kind of mystery that begins with a dead body and proceeds through an investigation by a detective or police officer; he said that from around the middle it makes the reader reluctant to learn the answer to what happened and that, rather than being a whodunit, it goes deeper into both the human side of the story and the mystery itself. He recommended it.

Kojima wrote that at that time he devoted himself solely to finishing the work, living each day dreaming only of completing Policenauts, and that it was a luxurious period spent purely as a creator; he added that later, once in his role as an executive and producer, his possibilities to create expanded, but he would never again be able to immerse himself for years in a single work as he did then, and that Policenauts can be considered the last work in which he was able to continue producing while looking only at the act of creating.