Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young
women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens
— had been dismissed in Japan
as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first
novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the
year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in
book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to
dominate it.
Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.
“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.
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