Beauty And The Nerd

An update on the otaku ("nerd") train story that was in today's LA Times supplement in The Daily Yomiuri:

THE WORLD

Beauty and the Nerd: Net Twist on Old Tale Captivates Japan

A bestseller compiled from chat room postings giving a young man courtship advice has publishers scrambling to find more Web talent.
By Bruce Wallace
Times Staff Writer

April 17, 2005
TOKYO It's not an original idea for a story but, hey, there's something to be said for sticking to the standards.

Boy meets girl. On a train. She disappears into the urban anonymity of, oh, make it Tokyo.

Our hero pines for the girl, but there's a problem: He's a bit of a nerd and she's a beauty. Besides, he doesn't even know her name.

Good and bad writers have been working out what comes next ever since trains were invented. But not until the Internet chat room was invented has anyone chosen to hand off the story line to hundreds of strangers, then collect their electronically delivered wisdom, as well as their rotten ideas, and publish the lot as a book.

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FOR THE RECORD:
"Trainman" photo caption in Sunday's Section A with an article about "Trainman," a Japanese bestseller that was taken from Internet chat room postings, misidentified Miki Nakatani, the actress who will star in the film version, as Ko Shibazaki.
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Now that's an original idea.

Profitable, too, for the book division of Japan's Shinchosha, publisher of "Densha Otoko," or "Trainman." The book is a front-to-back collection of e-mails from a popular Japanese chat room, where a real (we think) suitor's attempt to woo a girl known online as "Hermes" was encouraged, derided and ultimately celebrated from March to May of last year.

The book's editor, Hiroko Gunji, says she approached the shy hero of "Trainman" and then downloaded and edited the e-conversations. Published in November under the pseudonym Hitori Nakano, it has sold more than 550,000 copies and may have spawned a new category of Japanese publishing.

"The reason 'Trainman' sold so well is that the content was amusing," Gunji says, trying to explain the phenomenon.

"His dedication drew readers' attention, and people just kept encouraging him or advising him on how to approach the girl.

"When we approached him, he realized that people were touched by his story. So he agreed to publish it."

The number of people touched keeps growing. Five weekly comic books, or manga, have been spun off the book. A movie (you knew there had to be a movie) will begin shooting in June.

It has also sent Japanese book publishers frantically surfing chat rooms looking for the next gold mine of electronic correspondence. "Trainman" proved that the narrative threads of a chat line can be quickly and cheaply edited into book form, conveniently bypassing the need for the ego management that goes with nurturing writers.

"It's easier for publishers to spot attractive authors, even if they are amateurs, in the Net community and groom them rather than contacting existing professional authors," says Kayoko Shibuya of ALC, a mid-sized Japanese publisher that has formed Freedom Breeze Publishers Assn. with five other houses to help bloggers get published on paper.

"Trainman" has been joined on bookstore shelves by "This Week, My Wife Is Having an Affair," excerpts from a chat community's reaction to a husband made anxious by his wife's fling with someone she met online.

There is also "Reality Record: Diary of a Brutal Wife," the book version of a man's humorous blog about the lousy treatment he gets from his wife and daughter.

Click here to read the rest of the story.