i found this fascinating... technology is really changing things, even down to the most ancient art forms.
Carl Leo Aryee
I found this fascinating... technology is really changing things, even
down to the most ancient art forms.
Enjoy,
It seems improbable, even at this early stage, that 21-year-old Rin (a
nom de plume) might one day be granted a place alongside Fyodor
Dostoevsky in the pantheon of literary giants.
The nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan's south, is
celebrated for her skill with stichomythia and crude colloquialisms
but not, like the great Dostoevsky, the extent to which her writing
illuminates the darkest machinations of the mind.
For the time being at least, however, she is entrenched alongside the
Russian master in Japan, where the two have become major best-sellers
of fiction this year.
A new translation of Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karamazov,
released in July, has surprised its publisher by notching up more than
300,000 sales already - but it is Rin's rather less challenging
Moshimo Kimiga (If You ...), a 142-page hardback book about a
high-school romance, that has caused the bigger fuss.
"I typed it all on my mobile phone," Rin explains matter-of-factly
over the same device. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I
was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so
after a while it didn't take so long. I never planned to be a
novelist, if that's what you'd call me, so I'm still quite shocked at
how successful it's turned out."
So successful that one volume of her book, which began its life in a
series of instalments uploaded to an internet site and sent out to the
phones of thousands of young subscribers, has sold more than 420,000
copies since it was converted into hardcopy format in January.
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the
first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny
handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By
August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring
in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as
a fad, but as a new kind of culture".
Conservative literary academics in Australia who have been huffing
about the "radical" study in high-school English courses of SMS
messages as "text" have cause to be anxious.
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 - who, in Japan
especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit
could be mistaken for a tic. 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.
Mayumi Sato, a 37-year-old editor at Goma Books who turned Rin's
episodic melodrama into a bestselling book, says it is also her
favourite of the new generation. "I was actually crying at one point
while I was working on that one," she says about the story of a
high-school girl's fight against HIV.
"It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the
book after they've already read the story on their mobile. Often it's
because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the
novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they've
contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of
it."
Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), a site that has free tools to help
readers create their own mobile phone novels, has accumulated nearly 1
million works since it was set up seven years ago.
Predictably, the surge in popularity of crude, cellular storytelling
has raised eyebrows in academic circles.
Toru Ishikawa, a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo's Keio
University, points out that Japanese mobile phones allow their owners
only a limited selection of kanji, the Chinese characters regarded by
Japanese as more intellectually demanding than their native syllabary.
"The size of the screen also necessitates that [authors] use short,
simple sentences with basic words. If that's how you measure the
quality of literature, then yes, the prevalence of writing like this
will water down Japanese literature.
"But it could also encourage writers to be inventive with language in
new ways. Language must always evolve."
Rin says she often reads more challenging Japanese classics and
acknowledges that her work is deliberately aimed at young people.
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Carleo.Inc