TOKYO — Looking for a new market for the next Great American Novel? The Japanese have found one: mobile phones.Best-seller lists released at the end of 2007 revealed an interesting phenomenon in Japan: Novels originally tapped out in serial form on tiny cell-phone keyboards and distributed over the air to fans dominated the Japanese literature market when they were republished as traditional books. Of 2007’s 10 best-selling novels, five originally were published on and for cell phones. The first three spots were occupied by first-time cell-phone novelists whose love stories were written in the short sentences and abbreviations common to text messages and lacked significant plot and character development, according to The New York Times.
The debate touched off by the revelation has been active and somewhat polar in the country that gave the world its first literary novel millennia ago. Bungaku-kai, a Japanese literary journal, asked the rhetorical question “Will cell-phone novels kill ‘the author?’” on the cover of its January issue. Critics began to mourn the decline of Japanese literature, but fans were quick to praise the cell-phone works as a new literary genre more in tune with younger generations.
One thing is certain: The novels have represented a financial boon for their authors. One 21-year-old woman wrote a romantic tragedy over a six-month period while she was still in high school and then tapped it out on her cell phone and uploaded it to a popular website that showcases the work of aspiring authors. After it was voted best by the site’s fans, a publisher turned it into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It subsequently sold 400,000 copies and landed at No. 5 on the best-sellers list, according to the Times.
Even more impressive: The No. 1 best-seller, a cell-phone tear-jerker entitled Love Sky, not only was republished in book form but also was made into a movie.
According to the Times, the cell-phone novel phenomenon emerged in 2000 after a social-networking site discovered some of its users were posting novels-in-progress to their blog pages. It took four to five years for the trend to catch on, but the number of cell-phone novels listed on the site topped 1 million in December. The Times indicated the trend may have been fueled more by cellular carriers beginning to offer unlimited data transfer plans than by any dedicated literary or cultural movement. It seems to be the purview almost exclusively of people younger than 25; older folks are merely confused by the emoticons and abbreviations that litter the text. In addition, the most popular cell-phone novels seem to mimic the style of comic books, with underdeveloped characters and fragmented paragraphs patterns consisting mostly of dialogue. Many are written in the first person and provide readers a sort of pleasant voyeuristic guilt much like they might experience if they perused a secret diary.
