October 10, 2008
An excerpt from 14 Day Love,a downloadable novel by Kaori Riyou
The gears of fate have begun.
Little by little
but it's clear.
As a heart-rending scream cries out.
Translated by Thomas Looser
To read more, go to Magic iLand's cell-phone novel library.
In Japan, cell phone novels have proliferated as a convenient literary fix for a highly gadgeted, fast-paced society. It's also a uniquely participatory medium, enabling many young people to thumb their own works and become published authors via cell.
The SMS-based novels are generally formatted more like webpages rather than the simple chat interfaces common on American devices. But the narratives are still replete with the shorthand style and grammatical streamlining seen in chatspeak around the globe. And mobile phone literature, which has caught on in China as well, been gaining some commercial traction; last year, five of Japan's ten best sellers were originally published in cellular form.
Thomas Looser, a professor of East Asian Studies at New York University, sees the cell novel as a window into how technology is shaping popular culture and vice versa. While some Japanese literary purists dismiss SMS literature as a "dumbing down" of the language, he said, there is a growing recognition that "it is at very least a new genre, and perhaps that it's a new kind of poetic language."
More on SMS:
Storytelling via SMS in Finland.
Having trouble keeping up with the the expanding SMS lexicon?
Test your TXT IQ with our interactive quiz.
SMS in contxt main page
