Word: keitai
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...books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic. (See 25 must-have travel gadgets...
...Internet has been formative in the evolution of Japan's latest literary genre. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones. But "people wrote in asking for a place where they could be expressive and creative," says Akira Tanii, the site's founder. "We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book." Many of the early titles were collaborative products: site members would post reactions...
...male writer known as Yoshi who had the idea of bringing out the first keitai shosetsu in book form, however, and in doing so, became one of the first to break away from the pack. His self-published Deep Love (2002) was a collection of racy tales about a teenage prostitute in Tokyo that had previously appeared online. As a book, it sold 2.5 million copies and became a manga, a TV series and a film. It was also greeted as a one-off - the product of a quick-thinking writer-entrepreneur. But Maho i-Rando members soon began pleading...
...Individual voices are hard to find, however. As dictated by the medium, the language of keitai shosetsu is simple and peppered with emoticons. Dialogue and description are sparse. Subject matter is predictable. "Keitai shosetsu are usually about love stories - often romantic relationships experienced by the target audience," says Mari Kuramachi, an editor at Starts. Typically, a heroine loses her first love (in K, the male love interest dies in an accident), then later struggles to find love again. Obstacles can be gritty - rape, drugs, accidental pregnancies and prostitution are all common - but they are invariably overcome, and traumatic events usually...
...stories are often told in first-person narrative and lack diversity," agrees Matsuda. But that hasn't been a problem with consumers yet. "Why don't you write a novel and move me?" read one angry schoolgirl's recent online post, in response to a vehement keitai shosetsu detractor. So far, Japan's literary establishment hasn't come up with an answer...