The new I-novel?

The New Yorker has a great article on cell phone novels (keitai shousetsu) (via Meta no Tame):

The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class.

Read the whole thing. What's interesting to me is that keitai shousetsu seem to be a modern iteration of the I-Novel, (Watakushi-shousestu or Shi-shousetsu) a literary genre popular in Japan around the Taisho period. The I-novel is characterized by narratives that are both confessional and fictional. Part of the appeal of the I-novel was that authors would "confess" dark secrets from their own lives, but the novels were not autobiographical, and freely mixed in fictional characters or settings or events with the confessional elements of the story.

In the Taiso era these novels were mostly written by men, often confessing their affairs. The keitai shousetsu, however, seems to be a kind of new I-novel that is primarily produced by women. Like the I-novels of old, they freely mix fiction with the author's own true-life confessions.

However, the Taisho I-novels were written by famous novelists, and part of their attraction was learning about the sordid details of the lives of these famous cultural elites. Keitai shousetsu, on the other hand, are written by amateur authors, pecking away at their cell phones anonymously.* What's the appeal to consumers? Do they feel they can relate to the narratives? Does the amateur nature feel more honest? Is it refreshing to read literature in a format and language they are more comfortable with? I'd be very interested to find out.

I also like the interaction of media here. Authors publish theirs stories on websites, the best of which bubble up and are seized by print publishers. But simply printing the story isn't enough:

Printed, the books announce themselves as untraditional, with horizontal lines that read left to right, as on the phone. ... Other conventions established on the screen are faithfully replicated in print. Often, the ink is colored or gray; black text is thought to be too imposing. “Some publishers removed the returns, but those books don’t sell well,” a representative of Goma Books said. “You need to keep that flow.”

Does the horizontality, colored text and excessive line spacing create a feeling of intimacy between the reader and author? Does removing these conventions destroy the sense of amateur honesty, making it seem like a "professional" media production? This little interaction between different types of media is pretty fascinating.


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*Inputting Japanese on cell phones is easier than inputting English, but even so I can't imagine writing a whole novel on one! My poor thumbs!