Cell Phone Novels in Japan

The New Yorker has an interesting article on the literary phenomena of cell phone novels:

The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail. “I suppose you can say keitai shosetsu are a source of data or information—the way they use words, how they speak, how they depict scenes,” Kensuke Suzuki, a sociologist, told me. “We need these stories so we can learn how young women in Japan commonly feel.” 

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...the Japanese Internet, which is dominated by false names and forged identities. “Net transvestites,” the most extreme playactors are called. Match.com doesn’t work well here, because a majority of people won’t post photographs, and blogs—a recent study found that there are more of them in Japanese than in any other language—are often pseudonymous. Several years ago on 2Channel, a Japanese bulletin-board site that does not require registration, a user started a thread about his unexpected romance with a woman he met on a train. The story, a ballad of Japanese otaku (nerd) culture, became “Train Man”—a book, a movie, manga, a television series, and a play—but the author’s identity, now hopelessly confused with anonymous collaborators who took the narrative in their own directions, has still not come to light. He is known only as Nakano Hitori: One of Those People. Roland Kelts, a half-Japanese writer born in the United States and the author of “Japanamerica,” sees the Internet as an escape valve for a society that can be oppressive in its expectation of normative, group-minded behavior. “In Japan, conflict is not celebrated—consensus is celebrated,” he said. “The Internet lets you speak your mind without upsetting the social apple cart.” For confessional writers, it is a safe forum for candid self-expression and a magic cloak that makes it easy to disappear into the crowd. “The cell-phone writers have found a pretty clever strategy, through technology, for being part of the culture—participating in that interdependency—and also having a voice,” Kelts said.

Comments

[Edward Hathway]

Interesting. I suppose these won't ever be translated.

[Patrick McCoy]

I asked my students if they read them and they said they read some in highschool and that they were basically crap.