Twenty one years old Rin (not the real name), the nursery school teacher from Kokura, Southern Japan, will never dream that her novel, written down firstly using SMS menu is going to be major hit. Her series, now being converted into book, has been sold for more than 420 thousand copies. It is even higher than new translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic The Brothers Karamazov that reach 300 thousand copies.

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”.

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.

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.

Well said, will it become new method on creating story worldwide? Writing needs inspiration and inspiration may come in unexpected moment. The thing that can capture all of it maybe cellphone’s SMS textbox, since we usually carry cellphone everywhere in our pocket. This definitely better idea than converting book into ebook for mobile phone.

Source: SMH via localmobilesearch

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 Print Posted by Amir Karimuddin on December 12th, 2007