Media News - Tuesday, December 04, 2007
In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first
six months of the year were composed on the tiny handset of a mobile
phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. In just a few years,
mobile phone novels - or keitai shousetsu - have become a publishing
phenomenon in Japan, turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into
major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.
Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name
pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers. The stories
traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a
succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show
that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a
mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably
missing. Koizora (Love Sky) by Mika has sold more than 1.2 million
copies since being released in book format last October. The story,
about a high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant
and has a miscarriage in a saga of near-Biblical proportions, will soon
be made into a movie.
(Brisbane Times)
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