A cellphone novel sold 200,000 copies. Is it time to start questioning the role of literature?

Today I read the print edition of Dana Goodyear’s New Yorker article about Japanese cellphone novels.

The article claims that “the Japanese publishing industry has embraced the cellphone novel.” The article brings up the tense battle between literary critics and afficianados of the art form and by the end you are left wondering why we read and more importantly, why we create. The site asks you to register to read the article, but here is the summary contained in the link:

Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs, and all available for free. The novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love. The medium is revolutionary, opening the closed ranks of the literary world to anyone who owns a mobile phone. Some feared that the cell-phone novel augured the end of Japanese literature. Mentions Yumi Toyozaki and Mikio Funayama. Funayama assembled a panel which found that the novels aren’t literature at all but the offspring of an oral tradition originating with mawkish Edo-period marionette shows and extending to vapid J-pop love ballads. The Japanese publishing industry has embraced cell-phone books. The cell-phone novel was invented by a Tokyo man in his mid-thirties who calls himself Yoshi. Mentions Toshiya Arai and Shigeru Matsushima, of Starts Publishing Company. The writer describes meeting Mone, whose literary celebrity had left her feeling bitter. “Eternal Dream” sold two hundred thousand copies and by now has been accessed nearly three million times online; a sequel was published in the summer of 2007. “The Tale of Genji,” considered by many to be the world’s first novel, was written a thousand years ago. “Genji” is the epitome of official high culture, but some have noticed certain parallels with Japan’s new literary boom. The third annual Japan Keitai Novel Award ceremony, for a contest held by Starts, had a “Tale of Genji” theme. Cell-phone novelist Kiki won the grand prize.

Just Like a Girl

Whenever I travel distances longer than a day’s journey, I read a book. Whenever I commute home from work, or to yoga, or whenever I ride the subway to see my friend or to go to work, I read my phone. And more and more often, I use my phone to compose poems, write notes, write emails to people and even sketch out ideas for marketing the conferences that I run.

In short, my cellphone has replaced the Moleskine book I used to carry with me when I was in University, long before I had ever owned a Blackberry.

On the blogs that I maintain for work and for pleasure I am writing something for myself, but mostly I am writing for other people. I want to communicate. I want a circle of readers, friends and compatriots who think about the world in similar but subtly different and life-defining ways. I write to find someone else.

In this sense, I share something similar with young Japanese women, who use their cell phones to write novels.

The Book As Sewing Circle

When I was in graduate school for creative writing, I studied at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Subjects I studied: the construction and the social use of the novel, the poetry of the Renaissance poets, and the construction of the physical book.

The main theme throughout the creation and construction of the book (and the reader) from the Renaissance through to the eighteenth and nineteenth century was, to a point, the evolution of the female and male reader from a communal subject to an individual who worked and socialized in a type of niche or clique.

That seems to be exactly what cellphones are helping us to do now. We can find new cliques. We can make our own niches. Looking back at Japan:

Banana Yoshimoto, whose extremely popular novels are said to borrow their dreamy, surreal styel from girls’ manga, wrote in an email, “Youth have their own kind of suffering, and I think that the celphone novels became an outlet for their suffering. If the cellphone novells act as some consolation, that is fine.” She went on, “I personally am not interested in them as novels. I feel that it is a waste of time to read them.”

Waste of time or not, isn’t it a great pleasure to think that within the long history of Japan a smaller niche of teenage girls is evolving as readers and collaborators on an art form and a social communication form that accelerates their definition as individuals? It’s like having a microcosm of evolution going on within the context of its own evolving, technologically adept culture.

Or is that marketing talk? It might very well be. Again in Goodyear’s article:

The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail. “I suppose you can say keitai shosetsu are a source of data or information — the way they use words, how they speak, how they depict scenes,” Kensuke Suzuki, a sociologist, told me. “We need these stories so we can learn how young women in Japan commonly feel.”

A sociologist is different than a marketing manager. One wants to know, so that he can help educate the culture and address concerns and troubles that affect the young. The other might manipulate and try to sell them something, based on the product the young girls are creating for themselves.

Both are curious about the same issue. Why are there not more avenues available for young people, or people of all types to try their hand at art forms, literature or writing? Why is it all locked up by the experts?

These avenues are needed. I am not a young Japanese girl, but after a day in the corporate pigeon hole, warbling about revenues, marketing language, hypens and private debt, I want a release. I want to talk in my own language with my own people.

Halfway over the Manhattan Bridge the first of several texts for the night come in: “Ready to party? ”.