Japanese Cell Phone Novels?

I had no idea this was even possible, let alone wildly popular in Japan. The article from The New Yorker, entitled I (heart) Novels, by Dana Goodyear, was an eye-opener for me. I have to admit that at first, I was a little disgusted that these novels go straight from cell phones to media-sharing sites and one young author states "...never looking over what she wrote or contemplating plot." She goes on to say, "I had no idea how to do that, and I did not have the energy to think about it."

As an aspiring novelist, I took great umbrage to this attitude expressed within the first paragraphs, and then I continued reading.  I was amazed by what I learned about the Japanese culture and the prevalence of anonymity. It seems that just one of these cell phone novel sites "carries more than a million titles" and that they are considered insightful to "how young women in Japan commonly feel." The culture enforces that pain and suffering is the lot in life they must bear and that most of the internet is laden with "false names and forged identities." The authors dare not reveal who they are, even though their novels are so popular, because they are critically thrashed, fearing that "the cell phone novel augured the end of Japanese literature."

The surprising thing for me was that the article continues to reveal that once the cell phone novels come out, a fan base is built and they buy the book to "reaffirm their relationship to it in the first place." This is also leading to the release of Japanese literature in cell phone style!

The article is full of information regarding various styles of Japanese writing and that it is easier to create text on a cell phone since it is difficult to create Japanese characters on the computer. Why this is so was a little confusing for me and it's getting late.

The quote that was a true reflection of something that came up in class today, though, dealt with the legitimacy of these cell phone novels. Although the current popular authors are young women, it was actually a man in his mid-thirties that invented this phenomenon. The publisher questioned him and this man pulled a stack of e-mails from his readers. "Nobody was saying that he was a great writer, or that his grammar was good," he recalled. "And yet his young fans were all writing about how his book had affected their lives and moved them."

So, after all, is it about the text, or the reader's involvement with the text, that matters? Hmmm...