Japan Navigator

Dana Goodyear, poet and staff writer of The New Yorker, has an excellent piece on the phenomenon of the keitai novel – cell phone or mobile phone novels (I found the article thanks to Metanotame, which also has an interesting and lively discussion section on this subject).

Keitai novels are meant to be read in short chapters, with new installments downloaded every day. As Wikipedia says: “The first cell phone novel was “published” in Japan in 2003 by a young online writer, Yoshi. His first cell phone novel was called Deep Love, the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo. It became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a television series, a manga, and a movie.”

This first keitai novel was an exception, because it was written by a man. The keitai phenomenon that took off two or three years ago, has been wholly dominated by women. They write under short pen names, and strictly guard their real identity. Often they are young married women, who in their stories may pretend to be much younger. Also due to the nature of the medium, the novels are written in simple language, with very short sentences and a minimum of descriptions.

Buy Deep Love from Amazon.co.jp:

In 2007 five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan were originally cell phone novels. Like Deep Love, they are all about adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and fatal disease. Tearjerkers, like the popular “Seishun Eiga” (films about love among adolescents) or for that matter, Harlequin novels. Although there are differences with this last category – most keitai novels are not written by professionals and not for money either, but rather by young women who pour out their heart and prefer to remain anonymous – the conservative elements i.e. approval of the status quo of society, for example male domination, are the same as in the Harlequin books. Although they may contain slang and sexuality, keitai novels are in no way subversive.

They are not literature either (which must always contain such a subversive element, if only in the new way it teaches us to experience the world around us). The establishment need not be worried, although they are – perhaps because of the huge sales – it is painful to read that famous critics have been insulting the keitai novelists by making cheap fun of their pen names. Novelist Banana Yoshimoto puts it better. Although she herself considers keitai novels a waste of time, she says: “If the cell-phone novels act as some consolation, that is fine.” It is an interesting social phenomenon that has empowered many young women and enabled them to share their feelings and thoughts via these stories. By the way, I do not hear about any author getting rich thanks to their enormous sales, so the money probably went squarely to the publishing houses or the internet companies on whose sites they were originally published.

One of DVDs of the TV-drama that was based on Deep Love (via Amazon.co.jp):

Back to the article by Dana Goodyear, which I recommend. It is a long and detailed piece, all the more interesting because the author did her own investigations in Tokyo. She talked with various people in the industry and finally was able to meet Mone, one of the reclusive authors of keitai novels, a young married woman of short stature in “red tights and Eskimo boots and a meringue-shaped black knit cap with a pompom.” Mone is the author of the popular keitai novel Eternal Dream about a young woman who is raped, saved by a nice guy she falls in love with but who later appears to be her half brother etc. etc. It was among the 10 most popular books of 2007.

Buy Eternal Dream on Amazon.co.jp:

Dana Goodyear has an interesting website herself… Part of the website is her blog which she unfortunately stopped updating. It is worth going through the archives, with for example a post about “Gary Snyder in Japan.” But there is more on the site and the design is… well, interesting… something like a scratch board.

Dana Goodyear is also a poet and the site contains some of her work as well. Here is an example:

Double Vision

I feel a shadow watching
when I comb my hair.
You are backlit in the reading chair.

I keep asking where and where.
There, there. No, there there.

A review in the NY Times calls this an “ominous lullaby” in a poetry collection dominated by “wit and anger.” The collection, her first, is aptly called “Honey and Junk.”