Have you heard of mobile phone novels yet?
Tens of thousands of Japanese cell phone owners are poring over full-length books on their small mobile phone screens!
In this technology-enamored nation, the cell has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts -- rather advanced mobile features by global standards -- is routine.
Now, Japan's mobile phone users are turning pages. Several cell web sites offer hundreds of novels -- classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.
A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first cell novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their mobile phone.
Of last year's 10 best-selling novels in Japan,five were originally mobile phonenovels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time mobile phone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.
Whatever their literary talents, mobile phone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.
One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin,wrote "If You" over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be writers.
After mobile phone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.
"My mother didn't even know that I was writing a novel," said Rin, who, like many cell phonebook writers, goes by only one name. "So at first when I told her, well, I'm coming out with a novel, she was like, what? She didn't believe it until it came out and appeared in bookstores."
The mobile phone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cell phone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began exploding only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.
The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by mobile phone companies' decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates.
The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004. "Their cell phone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,' and you wouldn't hear from them for a while,said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing,a leader in republishing cell phonenovels.
The affordability of cell phones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than PC's, had been an significant part of their lives since being at school. So they read the novels on their mobile phones, even though the same websites were also accessible by PC. They punched out text messages with their fingers with blinding speed and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuanceswere lost on anyone over the age of 25.
"It's not that they had a desire to write and that the mobile phone happened to be there," said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied mobile phone novels. "Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the mobile phone instilled in them a desire to write."
Indeed, many mobile phone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.
The writers are not paid for their work online, no matter how many millions of times it is viewed. The payoff, if any, comes when the books are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the web sites that carry the books, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the web sites make most of their money from advertising
Critics say the novels owe a lot to something devoured by the young: comic books. In mobile phone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.
"Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,' " Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country."
"In mobile phone, you don't need that," said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cell phone books at the urging of her publisher. "If you limit it to a certain place, readers won't be able to feel a sense of familiarity."
Written in the first person, many mobile phone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th-century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote "The Tale of Genji."
"Love Sky," a debut book by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on mobile phoness or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease - the genre's sine qua non - the novel nevertheless captured the young generation's attitude, its verbal tics and the cell phone's omnipresence. Republished as a novel, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.
Given the cellphone novels' domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.
Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.
"They don't read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them," she said. "On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don't want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too obvious. But I'd like mobile phone novels to be recognized as a good thing."
As the cell phone'sbook popularity leads more people to write mobile phone books, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a mobile phone book if it is not composed on a cell phone, but on a PC or, inconceivably, in longhand?
"When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cell phone," said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of mobile phone novels. "Some hard-core fans wouldn't consider that a mobile phone novel."
Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.
Ms. Naito, the novelist, says she writes on a PC and sends the text to her mobile phone, with which she rearranges her work. Unlike the first-time cell phone novelists in their teens or early 20s, she says she is more comfortable writing on a computer.
But at least one member of the mobile phone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing's young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her fingers.
"Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied," said Mr. Matsushima of Starts.
"Since she's switched to a computer," he added, "her words have gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer."
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