London - The cellphone grows more indispensable every day. Talking's the least of it. We text and tweet, send photos, watch television and play games. But in Japan, land of the future, where all of the above is old hat, the keitai (cellphone) has spawned a wildly successful, populist literary genre. Keitai shosetsu, cellphone fiction, has been touted and reviled as the first narrative mode of the text-message age - fiction reconfigured by wireless telecom's powers.
I'm the first American author to write for Japanese cellphones. Most keitai-shosetsu auteurs hail from Japan's vast demographic of teenage girls and twentysomething young women, who thumb out lurid, mawkish romances on their keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in instalments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated websites such as Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry.
Astronomically popular, "thumb novels" are much decried as trash for yahori (slow learners). But over the last few years, this trashy subculture has stormed Japanese commercial book publishing. In 2007 - keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis - half of the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones.
Last autumn, a literary grandee joined in. Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as Purple, the author of a keitai shosetsu about a teen's search for love entitled Tomorrow's Rainbow. Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of The Tales of Genji, Japan's racy classic.
In late 2002, I was in Tokyo for the first time. Unlike Bill Murray, I'd found myself in translation. Three of my books of brief quirky tales had been serialised and published in Japan. One morning, I watched a Tokyo teen web-browsing on his cellphone - I hadn't heard of i-mode, the vanguard keitai Internet service launched in 1999 by Japan's telecom giant NTT docomo. I'd never even owned a cellphone. But I'd been on MTV with my mini-fables; I'd adapted them into a very episodic indie film. My work fits the short-attention-span age to a T, because, despite the impact of writers such as the late Raymond Carver, the short story got short shrift in fiction's limelight. But now technology was about to fix the script.
My translator, Professor Motoyuki Shibata, of Tokyo University, Japan's foremost translator of contemporary American writing, agreed. Back in New York, I hatched a format: no story over 350 words, for minimal thumb-scrolling; 12 words for opening sentences, to fit whole on a single screen. As Woody Allen advises about writing comedy - "make it shorter".
I began my keitai shosetsu in late 2003. I knew nothing of Deep Love, the seminal cellphone opus about a sex-for-money girl teen, which had just become the first of its kind to be brought out by a book publisher. (Written by "Yoshi", actually a thirtysomething guy, it has sold almost 3 000 000 copies.) Prostitution, Aids, rape, incest, abortion, drugs, suicide, desperate eternal love: these are keitai shosetsu's stock in trade.
I was clueless. I did figure on youngish readers (of both genders), and the need to Japanify.
I invoked manga, karaoke and pop music, and I rummaged through online sites such as Trends in Japan. My translator marvelled at my cultural savvy as I sent up young depressed male shut-ins (hikikomori), needy geeks (otaku) and the monstrous hegemony of Cute (kawaii). My keitai shosetsu finally launched with three stories a week, downloadable for a low fee at the "mobile paperback" site of my publisher, Shinchosha - 78 mini-tales in all. When they later came out as a slim hardback called I-Mode Stories, 100 000 readers had accessed them online. This seemed fine, until I learnt that Setouchi racked up 3,25 million.
I realise now what cost me most: interactivity. My lack of it, that is. I wrote my stories the old, author-as-god way: me writer, you reader. Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools where writers and readers engage each other. Yoshi shaped Deep Love based on ongoing hits and e-mails. (He even handed out fliers.) Keitai readers notoriously aren't big book buyers - but they will buy books as mementos of their communal involvement.
Despite US press coverage, the keitai shosetsu phenomenon hasn't so far headed West. Yes, a couple of websites, including one from a Japanese company, DeNA, now offer "mobile novel" templates. But cellphones play a different role in Japan. They, not computers, are the principal portal to the Internet.
"The majority of my students (19 to 22-year-olds) don't have a PC," notes Yuki Watanabe, a PhD candidate in Tokyo. "They're of the keypad, not keyboard, generation. The lingo of texting is normal language to them."
Just as influentially, says Roland Kelts, cultural critic and author of Japanamerica, Japanese commutes often last two hours each way.
"Holding a mobile inches from your face on a packed train and reading a confessional, melodramatic narrative provides the perfect intimate package of content, technology and portability."
For Britain and the US, the place where words and cellular/cyber technology seem to be finding new forms is Twitter. In contrast to Japan, teenagers aren't the main players. But interactivity is key and there's emerging energy in the creative potential of Twitter's 140-character format.
To me, most interesting aren't the micro-tales and poems, but the attempts at an ongoing narrative in short bursts, particularly hard-boiled crime thrillers - not surprising since the genre is conventionally lean and staccato. Take the "Twiller" (for Twitter thriller), by New York Times reporter and crime writer Matt Richtel. - The Independent