I recently ran across an article about the Japanese cell phone novel. Have you heard of this? Five or six years ago people in Japan started writing stories on their cell phones, dropping colorful phrases that painted some kind of angsty story of the life of a (usually) a young female narrator. Heartbreak, disappointments, incest, and many other juicy topics spewed forth from the phones of young people who wanted to tell a story.

The first cell phone novel, Deep Love, was created in 2003 by an author who called himself "Yoshi" and depicts the life of a seventeen-year-old high school student who becomes despondent and prostitutes herself. Deep Love was published online, and through a viral campaign involving high school students, soon became manga, dorama, and a movie.

An eighty-six-year-old Buddhist nun, Jakucho Setouchi, threw her literary hat into the ring as well, with a quote from Textually.org that I hope was poorly translated, because it kind of breaks my heart otherwise:

At this age, there are few things that interest me. But it was the first time I had written a cellphone novel, and it was exciting.

Setouchi has previously won prestigious literary awards, and recently was named one of Vogue Nippon's Women of the Year 2008. (I love the picture of her on this page in her purple robe among all the other women in modern dress.) Her novel, Tomorrow's Rainbow, weaves in elements of the classic Japanese novel Tale of Genji, which she famously translated. I wonder if Setouchi, who at first wrote under the pen name "Purple," added some sense of legitimacy to the genre, which is perceived as trashy, much like pulp fiction or bodice rippers.

I imagined my own tiny cell phone screen and even the nicest devices I
had seen people using and wondered how people could read and write
whole novels on their cellphones. Surely this was just a little niche
market? Not so. One thing the cell phone novel has in common with those genres is that popular novels sell millions of copies via downloads, and recent estimates indicate that sales outstrip paper novels in Japan. (1, 2)

According the first article I read on the subject (in the New Yorker), the style of writing is what makes them easy to read and enjoy:

On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest.

Blogger and critic Steven W. Beattie thinks the cell phone novel is a poor substitute for the real thing, and argues that the kids who avidly consume them are missing out if they don't broaden their horizons:

It’s not difficult to see that we risk losing something in the translation from page to cellphone screen (or computer screen, for that matter). We risk losing an appreciation of subtlety and irony, we risk losing an ability to recognize indirection or to delineate between fine moral distinctions. In short, we risk losing some of what makes us essentially human. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement to make, nor do I think it’s a risk we should be willing to take.

If you don't read Japanese, but want to give the text novel thing a whirl, you should check out Textnovel. The format bites right off of Japan's number one cell phone novel site, Maho i-land, but it's obviously much more accessible to English speakers. You can subscribe to the stories at the site, which are written in every genre you can imagine. I admit I'm fascinated and I'm going to be doing this on the bus next week to see what it's like.

So, have you read some? Written some? Could you embrace this format? Some people think Kindle flopped, so maybe this is something else that will just be lost in translation from Japan.