COVER STORY: The Way of Cool

Phone Books

Miho Yanagisawa reports on the literary phenomenon that is the keitai (cell-phone) novel.

A new form of culture born amid the spread of cell phones in Japan is the keitai novel. These stories are written using only a phone’s pushbuttons, sent in to specialized websites, and readers in turn can read them on their own phones. They are composed in a style where the number of characters per line is smaller than a conventional novel and dialogue is frequently used to make them easier to read on a cell phone’s small screen. Another feature is their generous usage of cell-phone emoticons.

Japan’s largest mobile portal site, Mobage Town, started a keitai novel site in 2007. Since then it has grown hugely popular, seeing one novel uploaded each minute, or one page every two seconds. The majority of these are composed and sent in by people who have never written a novel, many of whom are in their teens and twenties. Many of the novels are on the themes of school and fantasy.

According to Tetsuhiro Kaneko of the company which operates Mobage Town, DeNA Co., many of these keitai novels composed by regular people “are written in a simpler style than conventional, paper-based novels, which makes readers feel that maybe they can write one themselves.”

Everystar is another dedicated website for user-generated content. The site accepts entries from various genres created by users, such as novels, comics, illustrations and photos. With the hope of preventing keitai novels from becoming just another passing fad, the website began a system in 2010 that lets users vote for their favorite novels and pays the top-ranking writers.

“Some people criticize keitai novels as being completely different from actual books, but the fact that so many people are drawn to them indicates their potential. Creating a remuneration system can encourage writers to come up with even better work, and this can lead to overall improvement of these novels,” says Masayuki Ikegami of Everystar Co., which operates Everystar.

Some of the most popular keitai novels have been published as books, and on some occasions have been made into movies or TV ­dramas. A work by keitai novelist Sakurairo, a twenty-six-year-old who works for a company by day, is one such novel. The love story Kimi-no-sei (It’s your fault) that she sent in to a keitai novel site in 2008 became hugely popular and was published as a book that same year, and the next year it was also turned into a manga and a TV drama.

“I love writing novels. I used to write them on notebooks and my computer before sending them in,” she says. “But I usually stopped midway because I couldn’t develop the story any further. I started writing a keitai novel just like I was jotting down a memo, and readers sent in responses saying the story was interesting, or that they looked forward to what was going to happen next. I had no choice but to continue developing the story.”

Sakurairo now writes keitai novels at night, after work.

“I’d like to continue writing keitai novels while I’m a company worker,” she says.

Commenting on the mentality of young people in today’s Japan, Ikegami says, “By publicizing works they’ve created, they want to be appreciated by the general public rather than those close to them.”

Miho Yanagisawa is a freelance writer.