Cellphone novel

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A mobile phone novel ( Japanese 携 帯 小説 , Keitai shōsetsu or ケ ー タ イ 小説 , Kētai shōsetsu ) is a form of contemporary Japanese literature with mainly trivial and sensational topics.

These are for example love, sex, abortion, pregnancy, drugs. The central characteristic of a mobile phone novel is that the story was initially only available for reading on the mobile phone before it was published in print format. The pronounced cell phone culture of young girls and the widespread use of mobile internet in Japan are ascribed to have a major influence on the genre . The target group are school girls and young women in their twenties. But the readership has long since expanded, so that cell phone novels are also of interest to male young people and older people. The cell phone novel is stored and read on the cell phone , be it on the daily subway ride to work or to school, but also at home during leisure time. Cell phone novels can, but do not have to be, written on cell phones. The technical limitations - such as the size of the display - give rise to certain literary forms. Short, simple sentences are typical. Dialogues and monologues dominate the design of the text, descriptive representations are largely missing. Brief, precise language and fast-paced plots are favored . At the same time, smileys and abbreviations are often used, which are typical for the format of the short messages.

distribution

The mobile phone novel is either made available as a whole or appears as a serial novel with fixed or open episodes. A distinction must be made between free and paid cell phone novels. The free stories are made available for download from private cellphone sites. The largest Japanese mobile phone portal, which, in addition to options such as “blog”, “diary”, also enables the creation of a mobile phone novel page, is called “Magic I-sland” ( Mahō no I-rando ). According to its own statement, the site houses over 1 million cell phone novels that have been started. The chargeable cell phone novels can be purchased or subscribed to for a small fee on commercial cell phone sites from publishers, for example via the Shinchō kētai bunko (“The Shinchō cell phone collection”) site of Shinchōsha. A typical novel is broken up into small chunks that can be read in three to four minutes. Readers can comment on novels and influence the course of the plot. The genre has rapidly gained popularity through word of mouth: word of mouth here often does not mean talking about a story, but rather exchanging cell phone messages with links to popular novels.

Beginnings

As early as 2000, one of the first cell phone novels, a story about a teenage prostitute entitled Ayu no Monogatari (Part 1 of the Deep Love series ), became a phenomenon and bestseller. The author of the novel, a young Tokyo man who calls himself Yoshi , distributed thousands of business cards to schoolgirls as an advertisement for his novel in Shibuya , a trendy district of Tokyo, and thereby made his homepage, through which he distributed the novel, popular. Deep Love became a hit through word of mouth, and the book later became a movie, television series, and manga . The book was sold 2.7 million times in the classic print format. In the book version, the normal reading direction on cell phones was retained from left to right. This undermines the Japanese reading direction of printed texts from top to bottom. This "horizontal reading direction" ( yokogumi ) was adopted for all other mobile phone novel publications and is considered a distinguishing feature of a mobile phone novel .

The mobile phone novel in print format

Cell phone novels are a bestseller phenomenon, as shown in the following bestseller list - cell phone novels are marked in italics:

2007 title author publishing company
01 Koizora Mika Starts publishing
02 Akai ito Mei Goma Books
03 Kimizora Mika Starts publishing
04th Isshun no kaze ni nare Takako Satō Kōdansha
05 Moshimo kimi ga Rin Goma Books
06th Motomenai Shōzō Kajima Shogakukan
07th Jun'ai Haruka Inamori Starts publishing
08th Kage Hinata ni saku Hitori Gekidan Gentosha
09 Yoake no machi de Keigo Hogashino Kadokawa Shoten
10 Rakuen Miyuki Miyabe Bungei Shunju

Five of the top ten best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 were cellphone novels. Koizora ( 恋 空 ) by the author Mika with 12 million readers is in first place. On average, 400,000 copies of these titles are sold. The industry has a turnover of over 60 million euros. The first mobile phone novels have won literary prizes in Japan, such as the novel Clearness ( ク リ ア ネ ス , Kurianesu ), written by a 27-year-old author from Osaka who writes under the pseudonym Towa . Her mobile phone novel is about the love story between the student Sakura, who indulges her consumerism with prostitution, and the callboy "Leo". Towa received an award for this from the Mainichi Shimbun daily newspaper and her novel was published as a book.

Unlike “Deep Love”, all of the cellphone novels on the 2007 bestseller list were written by young amateur authors. For this reason, this phase is called “2. Boom phase ”from Yoshi's“ Deep Love ”. In the meantime, with the expansion of the boom, the term mobile phone novel has expanded and different types have emerged. The gynecologist Nahomi Sudō published "Love Communication", a sex guide in the form of a mobile phone novel. Writer aspirants like Yukinori Otani try to find their way into a career as an author through the format of the mobile novel. Established Japanese writers also write cell phone novels : the best-known example of this is Tomorrow's Rainbow ( あ し た の 虹 ) by Junbungaku author and Buddhist nun Jakuchō Setouchi ( 瀬 戸 内 寂 聴 ; * 1922).

Larger publishers in Japan have been involved in the mobile phone novel business for some time, which is forecast to have sales of $ 100 million over the next few years. For this reason, the mobile phone novel prizes are advertised specifically for the search for young talents and the layout and equipment of the volumes are standardized in order to achieve a high recognition effect. Meanwhile there are new editions of classics of Japanese literature, such as Osamu Dazai or Natsume Sōseki in the "mobile phone novel format", i. H. in the horizontal reading direction. Cell phone novels have also been an up-and-coming market in China for years, increasingly connecting the cell phone industry with traditional publishing houses and other entertainment sectors.

discourse

Cell phone novels are a phenomenon between technology, literature, youth culture and commerce. In Japan the phenomenon is discussed very differently between these two poles, depending on the point of view of the author. The focus of the analysis is on cell phone novels written by lay authors. There is a tendency to distinguish between two factions: one who perceives the mobile phone novels as a form of communication between young girls, the other who see them as a new literary format.

The expression that cell phone novels are a form of communication means that the stories were not intended as novels in the traditional sense, but rather served by the young women as a kind of means to an end to write about their own experiences and so with other “fellow sufferers “To get in touch. The media scientist Misa Matsuda therefore describes mobile phone novels as an "interactive medium". There is often a close connection between author and readership. Readers give suggestions, suggest new phrases and thus help determine the plot. Sociologists such as Shintarō Nakanishi, Yumiko Sugiura or Kenrō Hayamizu see cell phone novels primarily as important clues about the world of young girls.

For the Japanese literary market, cell phone novels are a topic on which opinions differ: On the one hand, the young genre is reduced to a pop-cultural phenomenon with comparisons to Manga , Anime , J-Pop . On the other hand, one sees in the mobile phone novels an opportunity to introduce a new group of readers to literature. The literary scholar Chiaki Ishihara comes to the neutral conclusion in his monograph: “Is the discussion about the question 'Are cell phone novels literature?' not absolutely pointless? [...] The expression 'cell phone novels are not literature' is a matter of taste. [...] Cell phone novels are literature created by the cell phone. "

Finally, in the western media, the mobile phone novel boom in the context of “electronic literature” is met with great interest. There, cell phone novels are understood as a Japanese phenomenon and a new genre of trivial literature that has its origin in the advanced Japanese cell phone technology and is mainly written and read by young women.

Cell phone novels in Europe

In Europe there have so far been mainly classic texts for mobile devices, for example in the context of the Gutenberg-DE project . The Lucy Luder and Handygirl series as well as the novel lonelyboy18 by Swiss author Oliver Bendel are among the few contemporary cell phone novels . The volume Lucy Luder and the murder in studiVZ was published in 2007. In October 2009 Wolfgang Hohlbein published a mobile phone novel called WYRM . In June 2012 the Wiesbaden author Heike Fröhling started a portal with contemporary cell phone novels. In addition to their own mobile phone novels Funkschatten , Mutterfeuer and Eisenmurmel , the focus here is on the interactive element, so that school classes can create their own mobile phone novels in the course of promoting reading. -

The most famous Japanese cell phone novels

  • Deep Love (4 volumes from 2002 to 2003) by Yoshi
  • Ijiwaru Penis ( い じ わ る ペ ニ ス , 2004) and “Love Link” (2006) by Mica Naitoh
  • Tenshi ga kureta Mono ( 天使 が く れ た も の , 2005) from Chaco
  • Koizora ( 恋 空 , 2006) by Mika
  • Clearness ( ク リ ア ネ ス , 2007) by Towa
  • Akai Ito ( 赤 い 糸 , 2007) by Mei
  • Tomorrow's Rainbow ( あ し た の 虹 , 2008) by Jakuchō Setouchi

See also

literature

Monographs (Japanese)

  • Kenrō Hayamizu: Kētai shōsetsu teki. 'Futatabi yankii-ka' jidai no shōjo-tachi . Hara Shobō, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-562-04163-3
  • Tōru Honda: Naze kētai shōsetsu wa ureru ka . Softbank Creative, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-7973-4402-8
  • Chiaki Ishihara: Kētai shōsetsu ha bungaku ka? Chikuma Shobō, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-480-68785-2
  • Toshiaki Itō: Kētai shōsetsu katsuji kakumei ron. Shinsedai e no māketingu jutsu . Kadokawa SS Communications, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-8275-5037-5
  • Yumiko Sugiura: Kētai shōsetsu no 'riaru' . Chūōkōron Shinsha, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-12-150279-7
  • Satobi Yoshida: Kētai shōsetsu wa ureru riyū . Mainichi Communications, Tokyo 2008, ISBN 978-4-8399-2660-1

Monographs (German)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Kētai shōsetsu 'tte dō na no? . In: Da Vinci , No. 159, July 2007. Media Factory, Tokyo, pp. 207–213 (Japanese)
  2. ↑ Mahō no I-rando no kētai shōsetsu ga 100-man taitoru toppa. (No longer available online.) Mahō no I-rando, May 21, 2007, archived from the original on December 3, 2008 ; Retrieved April 4, 2009 (Japanese, press release). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / company.maho.jp
  3. ↑ 'koibana ao', koibana aka 'hayakumo ichii ni rankuin! (No longer available online.) Starts Publishing, August 30, 2005, formerly in the original ; Retrieved April 4, 2009 (Japanese, press release).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ozmall.co.jp  
  4. ↑ Da Vinci No. 159, July 2007, p. 211 (Japanese)
  5. ^ Tohan annual bestseller list 2007, section fiction. ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 4, 2009 (Japanese)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tohan.jp
  6. ↑ ガ ッ キ ー も び っ く り! 大 ヒ ッ ト ケ ー タ イ 小説 「恋 空」 に パ ク リ 疑惑 . The Nagai Times Web, December 13, 2007, accessed August 6, 2008 (Japanese).
  7. ^ Georg Diez: Reading 2.0 . In: Die Zeit , No. 18/2007
  8. ↑ a b Sascha Kösch, Fairy Magdanz, Robert Stadler: Literature Prize for mobile phone novels. Spiegel Online , December 1, 2006, accessed April 17, 2009 .
  9. ↑ Tōru Honda: Naze kētai shōsetsu wa ureru ka . 2008, p. 20 (Japanese)
  10. ↑ press release. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Goma Books, August 2008, formerly in the original ; Retrieved April 4, 2009 (Japanese).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.goma-books.com  
  11. ↑ Da Vinci No. 159, p. 210
  12. ^ Tetsuo Matsuda: Japanese Literature Today: Publishing Trends for 2006 . In: Japanese Book News . No. 51 , 2007, p. 2–3 ( online [PDF; 736 kB ]).
  13. ↑ Ishihara: Kētai shōsetsu ha bungaku ka? . 2008, p. 18f. (Japanese)
  14. ↑ Lucy just had to go to the cell phone. Südkurier , July 19, 2008, accessed January 4, 2010 .
  15. ↑ Voltage on the display. Wiesbadener Tagblatt , July 10, 2012, archived from the original on May 14, 2013 ; Retrieved July 17, 2012 .