"In the age of AI, human randomness is becoming even more important"
His debut novel "If all the cats in the World Disappear" opened the way for a young Japanese film producer to world literature. The parable has become an international phenomenon with a total circulation of over 2 million copies. And in Russia, according to EKSMO, it turned out to be the best-selling book for 2025. In an exclusive interview with "Izvestia", the writer told how he was influenced by the work of Leo Tolstoy and Andrei Tarkovsky and why he considers human mistakes to be the engine of progress in the age of AI.
"I realized that I'm actually very afraid of losses."
— Your mother was a devout Christian and forced you to read the Bible from childhood. How did this affect your work?
— The Bible has been a part of my life since childhood. I guess I'm not so much consciously quoting her as I naturally rely on the Christian worldview when I come up with stories.
I conceived ""If all the cats in the world disappear" as a kind of inverted "Book of Genesis": if God creates the world in it step by step, then in my case the world, on the contrary, gradually disappears — one after the other. In "Exit" 8, I combined the image of the underpass with the purgatory from Dante's "Divine Comedy." I want to mix the Japanese perception of the world, the Christian context, and my own life experiences to create stories that people can understand regardless of country and culture.
— Your novel "If all the cats in the World Disappear" became a bestseller and was adapted into a film. You wrote it after your uncle died of a brain tumor. Shortly before his death, he said, "Even if I die, nothing will change in the world." Now, a few years after the book was published, have you managed to prove that he was wrong?
— I don't think I've been able to prove that Uncle's words were a mistake. Rather, after that conversation, I constantly wondered: does the disappearance of one person really not change the world in any way? At least my uncle's death has changed my world a lot. And the novel that was born out of this loss is now being read in many countries, including Russia, far from Japan. I feel that the desire to cherish the memory of the dead and appreciate what we have lost is a universal human feeling that does not depend on time or country.
— You said that after writing each book you learn something new about yourself and that one of the reasons for your creativity is an attempt to understand who you are. What unexpected things have you learned about yourself through this novel?
— I realized that I am really very afraid of losses. But at the same time, I realized something else: sometimes it's only when we lose something that we begin to see things that we hadn't noticed before.
Genki Kawamura
One of the starting points for this novel was when I lost my mobile phone and suddenly noticed a rainbow outside the train window. Before that, I was too focused on acquiring, receiving, and finding something. And the loss suddenly helped me see what really matters. It was this feeling that became one of the discoveries I made about myself while working on the book.
"Russian literature has been a great influence on me for a long time"
— The novel has been in the top of the bestsellers in Russia for several years. How did you feel when you found out that you have a large fan base in our country?
— I did not expect such success at all. When I found out that a million copies had been sold here, I was really surprised and very happy. When I came here in 2019 and met with the "Bombora" team, I could not even imagine that my book would be read for so long and so much. At first glance, Japan and Russia seem to be very different cultures. But the feelings associated with loss, memory, and the people we care about are universal. Perhaps the fact that I myself grew up in a Christian family creates a certain sense of closeness with readers.
— You have admitted that the works of Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky influenced your work. If you were offered to film a work by a Russian author, who would you choose?
— Russian literature has been a great influence on me for a long time. I especially love Tolstoy's novels, and Tarkovsky strongly influenced me in the cinema. If I were creating a story set in this country myself, I would like to write something about family and brothers in the spirit of Tolstoy's works.
— And which Russian writer, in your opinion, is particularly interesting to the Japanese public?
— For Japanese readers, the themes that Russian literature has been exploring for many years — family, love, death, guilt, faith — are also not alien at all. It's hard for me to choose one person, but I think Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are writers who are still worth reading, despite the differences in eras and countries.
""""You came to literature from cinema and as a producer you worked on completely different films, from "Confession" and "Malice" to "Your Name". What did cinema teach you as a writer and literature as a producer?
— Cinema has taught me to think about the plot through what can be seen and heard. Even when I'm writing a novel, I'm pretty clear about the sequence of visual scenes. And literature has taught me the power of imagination — the ability to make a person imagine something that cannot be shown on the screen.
For example, in "If all the cats in the world disappear" it is very difficult to visually convey the state of the world in which there really are no cats left. And in the novel, the reader can create this world in his head. On the other hand, it's impossible to hear music in a book. Therefore, I try to keep in mind the possibilities of each type of art and choose the form that best suits a particular story.
"We can see war or violence on the screen and just swipe on"
— You directed and wrote the psychological thriller "Exit 8". One of the important themes of the painting is the need for internal changes that help a person become more aware and learn to take responsibility. Have you ever worked on these qualities yourself?
— In "Exit 8" I wanted to talk not so much about how to become an ideal or outstanding person, but about how not to pretend that you don't see anything. Today, we can notice a person who feels bad in a subway car, but instead of paying attention to him, we bury ourselves in a smartphone. We can see war or violence on the screen and just swipe on. I'm no exception either.
That's why I turned that underpass into a kind of purgatory, where a small sense of guilt inside a person manifests itself in the form of "anomalies". I myself try to pay attention in my daily life to what I see and what I prefer not to notice.
"Exit 8" was born out of a Japanese video game, but its themes—anxiety, repetition, a sense of being trapped, and the need to look carefully at the world around them—are understandable to people far beyond Japan. While working on the painting, did you think about how it would be perceived in other cultures, in particular in Russia?
— I did not create the film with a specific country in mind. But from the very beginning, it seemed to me that there was a feeling in this story that was familiar to people living in big cities around the world. Get lost in the subway. Walk through the same place several times. To see that others are looking at smartphones and do not notice what is happening right in front of them.
I think this feeling is understandable not only in Tokyo, but also in Paris, London or Moscow. As a result, I combined the very Japanese atmosphere and order of the underpass from the game with the Western image of purgatory from Dante's "Divine Comedy." Perhaps it was this combination that allowed the story to resonate with people of different cultures.
"Humanity is moving towards greater convenience and predictability"
— You stated that in the heyday of artificial intelligence, "human randomness" is especially important to you as an author — a mistake or an impulsive choice that an algorithm is incapable of. Now that AI is writing texts and generating images, do you see it as a threat to creativity?
— I rather think not about the threat, but about the fact that thanks to AI it will become even more obvious what exactly only humans can do. Artificial intelligence can create accurate answers very quickly by analyzing huge amounts of data. But lately I've been particularly interested in randomness. Mistake. Meeting with something unexpected. An impulsive choice. Sometimes it is precisely from such ineffective, unpredictable events that stories are born. Therefore, in the age of AI, it seems to me that the question of how to use human mistakes and accidents in creativity becomes even more important.
— Do you use neural networks in your work?
— I am very interested in the advantages and disadvantages of using artificial intelligence. But the basis of my work remains the things that I saw myself, impressions from meetings with people and events that happened by chance. Rather, I see AI not as a tool to look for "answers", but as a reason to think about what human creativity is in a world where artificial intelligence is becoming an everyday part of life.
— Writers often predict the future. In your opinion, where is humanity heading?
— It seems to me, in the direction of greater convenience and predictability. With the help of AI, many things that previously had to spend a lot of time on will be automated. But, on the other hand, perhaps that is why people will begin to strive even more for randomness and imperfection.
I walk around Tokyo every day and collect things that I come across by chance: forgotten things, signs on the streets, some details that suddenly caught my attention. If we only strive for efficiency, we would simply not notice all this. No matter how much the world is optimized, stories will still be born from unforeseen encounters and emotions that we are not always able to explain even to ourselves.
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