Young women develop a genre for the cellular age.
by Dana Goodyear
December 22, 2008
The New Yorker
In 2007, cell-phone novels held four of the top five spots on the literary best-seller list.
Mone was depressed. It was the winter of 2006, and she was twenty-one, a onetime beauty-school student and a college dropout. She had recently married, and her husband, whom she had known since childhood, was still in school in Tokyo. Thinking that a change might help, she went to stay with her mother, in the country town where she had grown up. Back in her old bedroom, she nursed her malaise, and for weeks she barely left the house. “I’d light a match and see how long it would burn, if you know what I mean,” she says. One day, at the end of March, she pulled out all her old photo albums and diaries, and decided to write a novel about her life. She curled up on her side in bed and began typing on her mobile phone.
Mone started posting her novel straight from her phone to a media-sharing site called Maho i-Land (Magic Island), never looking over what she wrote or contemplating plot. “I had no idea how to do that, and I did not have the energy to think about it,” she says. She gave her tale a title, “Eternal Dream,” and invented, as a proxy for her adolescent self, a narrator named Saki, who is in her second year of high school and lives in a hazily described provincial town. “Where me and my friends live, in the country, there aren’t any universities,” Mone wrote. “If you ride half an hour or so on the train, there’s a small junior college, that’s all.” Saki has a little brother, Yudai, and a close-knit family, a portrait that Mone painted in short, broad strokes: “Daddy / Mom / Yudai / I love you all so much.” Before long, however, Saki, walking home from school, is abducted by three strange men in a white car: “—Clatter, clatter — / The sound of a door opening. / At that moment . . . / —Thud— / A really dull blunt sound. / The pain that shoots through my head.” The men rape her and leave her by the side of the road, where an older boy from school, Hijiri, discovers her. He offers her his jersey, and love is born.
On Mone’s third day of writing, readers started to respond. “Please post the next one,” and “I’m interested to see what happens,” she remembers them writing. She had been posting about twenty screens a day—roughly ten thousand words—divulging as freely as in her diaries, only this was far more satisfying. “Everyone is suffering over their loves and trying to figure out their lives, but my particular struggle was something I wanted to let other girls know about,” she says. “Like, ‘Hey, girls, I’ve been through this, you can make it, get up!’ ”
Soon, Mone’s story took a Sophoclean turn. In a sudsy revelation scene, Saki discovers that she is not her father’s child. She follows Hijiri to Tokyo for college, but he breaks up with her abruptly. After taking solace in a romance with a younger student named Yuta, she learns that Hijiri is her half brother:
Saki and Hijiri . . .
Are blood relatives, “siblings” . . . ?
The same blood . . .
Runs through our veins . . .
“Older brother and younger sister attract each other”
I’ve heard something like that.
Around the tenth day, Mone had an epiphany. “I realized that I couldn’t put down just exactly what happened,” she says. “It came to me that there needed to be the hills and valleys of a story.” Her tale acquired the glaze of fiction—how she wished her life had turned out rather than how it did. In a postscript, she writes that, unlike Saki and Hijiri, who eventually get back together, Mone and the real Hijiri went their separate ways, and she ended up with Yuta, who had loved her all along.
By mid-April, Mone had completed her novel, nineteen days after she began. Her husband finished school and was starting a job in finance, and she went back to the city to join him. “I was living a casual, unfocussed life in Tokyo,” she says, when she heard from Maho i-Land that a publisher wanted to release her novel as a proper book. In December, 2006, “Eternal Dream” was published, at more than three hundred pages. The book distributor Tohan ranked “Eternal Dream” among the ten best-selling literary hardbacks for the first half of 2007. By the end of that year, cell-phone novels, all of them by authors with cutesy one-name monikers, held four of the top five positions on the literary best-seller list. “The Red Thread,” by Mei, which has sold 1.8 million copies, was No. 2. “Love Sky,” by Mika, was No. 1, and its sequel third; together they have sold 2.6 million copies.
The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.
In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. 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.”
The medium—unfiltered, unedited—is revolutionary, opening the closed ranks of the literary world to anyone who owns a mobile phone. One novelist I met, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who lives in the countryside around Kyoto, told me that she thinks up her stories while affixing labels to beauty products at her factory job, and sometimes writes them down on her cell phone while commuting by train to her other job, at a spa in Osaka. But the stories themselves often evince a conservative viewpoint: women suffer passively, the victims of their emotions and their physiology; true love prevails. “From a feminist perspective, for women and girls to be able to speak about themselves is very important,” Satoko Kan, a professor who specializes in contemporary women’s literature, said. “As a method, it leads to the empowerment of girls. But, in terms of content, I find it quite questionable, because it just reinforces norms that are popular in male-dominated culture.”
In a country whose low birth rate is a cause for national alarm, and where Tokyo women in their thirties who have yet to find a mate are known as “loser-dogs,” the fantasy of rural life offered by the cell-phone novels, with their tropes of teen pregnancy and young love, has proved irresistible. “Love Sky,” by Mika, which has been viewed twelve million times online, and has been adapted for manga, television, and film, is a paradigm of sexual mishap and tragedy lightly borne. Freshman year, the heroine—also Mika—falls in love with a rebel named Hiro, and is raped by a group of men incited by Hiro’s ex-girlfriend. Then Mika gets pregnant with Hiro’s child, and he breaks up with her. Later, she finds out why: he is terminally ill with lymphoma and had hoped to spare her. In the movie version, which came out last fall and earned thirty-five million dollars at the box office, Mika has tears streaming down her face for the better part of two hours. The moral of the story is not that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and so should be avoided, but that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and pain is at the center of a woman’s life.
Assuming a pen name is a rite of pas sage for a writer in Japan. Basho did it in the seventeenth century; Banana Yoshimoto did it in the nineteen-eighties. Mone chose hers rather arbitrarily: she liked the allusion to the French painter and the fact that the Japanese characters can mean “a hundred sounds.” But, like many cell-phone novelists, she takes the disguise a great deal further, and makes of her identity a fictional conceit: the spectral, recessive wallflower author whose impression on the world, for all the confessions contained in her novel, is almost illegibly faint. She has a blog, which states her age as eight, her home as “the heart of a mountain,” and her hair style as “a poisonous mushroom.” Hobbies: drinking, being lazy, and behaving like a baby. Favorite type of guy: the teacher type. There is no photograph, just a cartoon avatar. “I would never let my image be seen,” she told me. “If I’m ever photographed, I only show part of my face, just the profile.” Apart from her husband, her immediate family, and a few close friends, no one knows that she’s the author of “Eternal Dream.” “I don’t want to bring unwanted attention on my family,” she said. “And it’s not just me—there’s my husband’s family to think of, given the things I’m writing. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. Revealing anything, whether it’s fiction or truth, is embarrassing, don’t you think?”
Mone’s withholding is consistent with the ethos of the Japanese Internet, which is dominated by false names and forged identities. “Net transvestites,” the most extreme playactors are called. Match.com doesn’t work well here, because a majority of people won’t post photographs, and blogs—a recent study found that there are more of them in Japanese than in any other language—are often pseudonymous. Several years ago on 2Channel, a Japanese bulletin-board site that does not require registration, a user started a thread about his unexpected romance with a woman he met on a train. The story, a ballad of Japanese otaku (nerd) culture, became “Train Man”—a book, a movie, manga, a television series, and a play—but the author’s identity, now hopelessly confused with anonymous collaborators who took the narrative in their own directions, has still not come to light. He is known only as Nakano Hitori: One of Those People. Roland Kelts, a half-Japanese writer born in the United States and the author of “Japanamerica,” sees the Internet as an escape valve for a society that can be oppressive in its expectation of normative, group-minded behavior. “In Japan, conflict is not celebrated—consensus is celebrated,” he said. “The Internet lets you speak your mind without upsetting the social apple cart.” For confessional writers, it is a safe forum for candid self-expression and a magic cloak that makes it easy to disappear into the crowd. “The cell-phone writers have found a pretty clever strategy, through technology, for being part of the culture—participating in that interdependency—and also having a voice,” Kelts said.
As an online phenomenon, the novelists were an overlooked subculture, albeit a substantial one. Crossing into print changed that. “In terms of numbers, the fact that the Web had many millions of people accessing and a great number reading is amazing, but the world didn’t know whether to praise that or not,” Satovi Yoshida, an executive at a cell-phone technology company, said. “With the awful state of publishing, to sell a hundred thousand copies is a big deal. For a previously unpublished, completely unknown author to sell two million copies—that got everyone’s attention.” Mostly, the attention was negative. In the fall of 2007, Yumi Toyozaki, a popular critic known for her strident reviews, was invited on the radio for what the show’s host called a “critical thrashing of the booming cell-phone novels,” and brought in a stack of books from the best-seller list.
“No. 10 is ‘Eternal Dream,’ by—how do you read this name? Mone? Hundred sound?” Toyozaki said. “These names are often formed with just two characters.”
“Is the author Chinese-Japanese?” the host asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It sounds like a dog’s name,” the host said. He mentioned that these were literary best-sellers.
“I don’t even want to use the word ‘literary,’ ” Toyozaki said. “It should be in Other or Yankee.”
“I visit a bookstore two or three times a week, but I never stop in the cell-phone-novel area.”
Toyozaki concurred. “Once you stop there, you feel sick,” she said.
Some feared that the cell-phone novel augured the end of Japanese literature. “Everyone in publishing received this as an enormous shock to the system, and wondered, What is happening here?” Mikio Funayama, the editor of Bungakukai, a respected monthly literary journal, told me. “The author’s name is rarely revealed, the titles are very generic, the depiction of individuals, the locations—it’s very comfortable, exceedingly easy to empathize with,” he said. “Any high-school girl can imagine that this experience is just two steps from her own. But this kind of empathy is largely different from the emotive response—the life-changing event—that reading a great novel can bring about. One tells you what you already know. Literature has the power to change the way you think.” For the January, 2008, issue of Bungakukai, Funayama assembled a panel to answer the question “Will the cell-phone novel kill ‘the author’?” He took some comfort in the panel’s conclusion: 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 have long been attracted to these turgid narratives,” he said. “It’s not a question of literature being above it. It’s just—it’s Pynchon versus Tarantino. Most people have a fair understanding of the difference.” Banana Yoshimoto, whose extremely popular novels are said to borrow their dreamy, surreal style from girls’ manga, wrote in an e-mail, “Youth have their own kind of suffering, and I think that the cell-phone novels became an outlet for their suffering. If the cell-phone novels act as some consolation, that is fine.” She went on, “I personally am not interested in them as novels. I feel that it’s a waste of time to read them.”
Japanese books read right to left, and the script falls vertically from the top of the page, like spiders dangling from silk. The words are combinations of characters drawn from three sources—hiragana, a syllabary thought to have been developed for upper-class women, some twelve hundred years ago; katakana, a syllabary used mostly for words of foreign origin; and kanji, Chinese characters whose mastery is the measure of literary accomplishment. Until the eighties, when the word processor was introduced, the great majority of Japanese was written longhand. (Japanese typewriters, complicated and unwieldy because of all the kanji, were left to specialists.) Even now, personal computers are not widespread: one machine per family is common.
For young Japanese, and especially for girls, cell phones—sophisticated, cheap, and, for the past decade, capable of connecting to the Internet—have filled the gap. A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.” (With the new iPhone and the advent of short-text delivery services like Twitter, American cellular habits are becoming increasingly Japanese; there are at least two U.S. sites, Quillpill and Textnovel, both in the beta stage, that offer templates for writing and reading fiction on cell phones.)
On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest. “You’re not trying to pack the screen,” a cell-phone novelist named Rin told me. (Her name, as it happens, actually was borrowed from a dog: her best friend’s Chihuahua.) “You’re changing the line in the middle of sentences, so where you cut the sentence is an essential part. If you’ve got a very quiet scene, you use a lot more of those returns and spaces. When a couple is fighting, you’ll cram the words together and make the screen very crowded.” Quick and slangy, and filled with emoticons and dialogue, the stories have a tossed-off, spoken feel. Satoko Kan, the literature professor, said, “This is the average, ordinary girl talking to herself, the mumblings of her heart.”
The Japanese publishing industry, which shrunk by more than twenty per cent over the past eleven years, has embraced cell-phone books. “Everyone is desperately trying to pursue that lifeboat,” one analyst told me. Even established publishers have started hiring professionals to write for the market, distributing stories serially (often for a fee) on their own Web sites before bringing them out in print. In 2007, ninety-eight cell-phone novels were published. Miraculously, books have become cool accessories. “The cell-phone novel is an extreme success story of how social networks are used to build a product and launch it,” Yoshida, the technology executive, says. “It’s a group effort. Your fans support you and encourage you in the process of creating work—they help build the work. Then they buy the book to reaffirm their relationship to it in the first place.” In October, the cover of Popteen, a magazine aimed at adolescent girls, featured a teenybopper with rhinestone necklaces and pink lipstick and an electric guitar strapped to her chest, wearing a pin that said, “I’d rather be reading.”
Printed, the books announce themselves as untraditional, with horizontal lines that read left to right, as on the phone. “The industry saw that there was a new readership,” one publishing executive said. “What happens when these girls get older? Will they ever grow up and start reading literature that is vertical? No one knows. But, in a world where everyone is texting and playing games on the Internet, the fact that these paper books are still valued is a good thing.” Other conventions established on the screen are faithfully replicated in print. Often, the ink is colored or gray; black text is thought to be too imposing. “Some publishers removed the returns, but those books don’t sell well,” a representative of Goma Books said. “You need to keep that flow.” Goma, which was founded twenty years ago, has emerged as a leading publisher of cell-phone novels. In April, through its Web site, it began releasing for cell phones Japanese literature on which the copyright has expired, including the work of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, and Soseki Natsume. “Masterpieces in your pocket! Read horizontally!” the site declared. This summer, Goma began to print the books in cell-phone style. Its collection of Akutagawa stories, named for his classic short piece “The Spider’s Thread,” has horizontal blue-gray text and, for cover art, an image of a slender uniformed schoolgirl, lost in thought.
D espite its associations with the nu bile and the rustic, the cell-phone novel was invented not by a teen-age girl pining in the provinces but by a Tokyo man in his mid-thirties. Yoshi, as he called himself, was a tutor at a cram school, and later had an office in Shibuya, the hub of youth culture in the nineties: he had plenty of opportunities to observe the beginning of the love affair between young women and their phones. By 2000, when Yoshi set up a Web site and started posting his novel, “Deep Love,” Shibuya had been attracting media attention for several years as a center of enjo kosai, a form of prostitution in which schoolgirls trade sex with middle-aged men for money or designer clothes. Yoshi’s seventeen-year-old heroine sells her body to pay for a heart operation for her boyfriend, Yoshiyuki, but—shades of O. Henry—the money never reaches him, and she dies of AIDS contracted from a client. Yoshi has said that the idea for the heroine’s death came from a young reader who wrote to him that she got AIDS from enjo kosai. Self-published as a book, “Deep Love” sold a hundred thousand copies.
“This phrase—‘a hundred thousand copies’—was what stopped me,” Toshiya Arai, the executive director of Starts Publishing Company, said. At the time, Starts, which was founded as a real-estate company, was producing local shopping magazines and dining guides. “I thought this was unprecedented,” Arai said. “I thought this person must be a liar, and I wanted to see him face to face.” I met with Arai, a small man with sharp eyes and a mole dead center between his brows, and his colleague Shigeru Matsushima in a conference room at the company’s office, near Tokyo Station. Arai said that in the summer of 2002 he visited Yoshi, who printed out for him a stack of e-mails from readers. “Nobody was saying that he was a great writer, or that his grammar was good,” Arai recalled. “And yet his young fans were all writing about how his book had affected their lives and moved them.” A few months later, Starts published “Deep Love,” which was made into manga, a television drama, a film, and, eventually, a series of novels that sold 2.7 million copies. “It’s a messed-up tale of love,” Arai said. “Even among keitai shosetsu, it’s a sordid adventure.” Yoshi, who has left Tokyo and is living quietly in the countryside, has never revealed his name. According to his manager, “Yoshi personally thinks that background information about authors distracts readers when they are reading books.”
Around the time that Yoshi started posting, Maho i-Land, which was founded in 1999, added a template called “Let’s Make Novels” to its site. After the introduction of unlimited data-transmission packages for cell phones, in 2003, the number of novel writers and readers increased dramatically, an efflorescence as spontaneous as a grow-your-own-crystal set but no less marvellous. Toshiaki Ito, who worked at the company from 2004 to 2007, told me, “By the time I had joined, there was a culture for novels building up on the site. Inside the company, we understood that we had a lot of great content—we had a pile of jewels—and we discussed among ourselves what to do with this treasure chest we had accumulated.”
The first of the Maho i-Land trove to be turned into a book was “What the Angel Gave Me,” by Chaco, which Starts brought out in 2005. Last year, Arai said, Starts published twenty cell-phone novels, which accounted for nearly a third of the company’s forty-three-million-dollar revenue. Mika’s “Love Sky” is Starts’s most popular title. When I asked Arai if I could meet Mika, he appeared nonplussed. “She is never photographed, and she does not respond to interviews,” he said. “This is her wish, and what can we do but honor it? It’s understood that the story is based on her experience.” I pressed him for details about her identity. “She’s twenty-four, and is a woman,” he said at last.
“You’re not supposed to say her age!” Matsushima, his colleague, snapped. He turned to me. “If you don’t mind, could you just say that she’s young?”
It was weeks before Mone agreed to see me. When we met, outside a tea shop at a busy intersection not far from Shibuya, she was wearing red tights and Eskimo boots and a meringue-shaped black knit cap with a pompom. Ito, the former Maho i-Land employee, had acted as our liaison, and he was there as a chaperon. As we walked up the street to a traditional Japanese restaurant for dinner, Mone trotted along on the balls of her feet, like a toddler.
Mone is short, with brown hair, curled lashes, and wide-set, placid eyes. She has a bow-shaped mouth and wayward canines—the right one sometimes pokes out through her closed lips, giving her the evil-sweet look of a Nara painting. She was reserved at first, picking daintily at the sashimi course. When a simmering dish of motsunabe—cow intestine, cabbage, and tofu—arrived, she took a picture of it with her phone, which was ornamented with a strawberry and a Teddy bear.
As the night progressed, Mone grew more animated. Her literary celebrity had left her feeling bitter—the novel had occasioned heated family fights—but she was mostly angry at herself. “I regret almost everything I’ve ever published,” she said. “I could have done a lot to cover things up and I didn’t. I feel a profound responsibility about that.” The label of writer, she said, is unsuitable both to her and to the genre. “If I were some super-famous novelist, I would be running around saying, ‘Hey, I’m a novelist.’ But I’m not. I’m treated as this lame chick who’s written one of those awful cell novels. Do you think I can be proud of that? It really depends on which side the public is going to join. I’m considered a total loser for having done it, and I myself think that, too.” Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes glittered. “People say these horrible things about cell-phone novels, and I’m not sure they’re mistaken. They say we’re immature and incapable of writing a literate sentence. But I would say, so what? The fact that we’re producing at all is important.”
“Eternal Dream” sold two hundred thousand copies and by now has been accessed nearly three million times online; a sequel, also posted on Maho i-Land, was published in the summer of 2007, and sold eighty thousand copies. Mone calculates that she has made a little less than two hundred thousand dollars from her writing career. At dinner, I asked her if her life had changed in any way. “Not at all,” she said. “You have to understand that at no point did I ever think this would feed me,” she said. “I’m just another Japanese girl, no better or worse than any other girl walking down the street.”
“T he Tale of Genji,” considered by many to be the world’s first novel, was written a thousand years ago, in the Heian period, by a retainer of Empress Akiko at the Imperial Palace, in present-day Kyoto. The Heian was a time of literary productivity that also saw the composition of “The Pillow Book,” Sei Shonagon’s exquisitely detailed and refined record of court life, and a wealth of tanka poems. We know “Genji” ’s author by the name Murasaki Shikibu—Murasaki, or Purple, being the name she gave her story’s heroine, and Shikibu the name of the department (Bureau of Ceremonial) where her father at one time worked. Told episodically, and written mostly in hiragana, as women at the time were not supposed to learn kanji, it is the story of Genji, the beautiful son of the Emperor by a courtesan, who serially charms, seduces, and jilts women, from his rival’s daughter to his stepmother and her young niece Murasaki. “Genji” is the epitome of official high culture—it is to the Japanese what the Odyssey is to the Greeks—but some have noticed certain parallels with Japan’s new literary boom. “You have the intimate world of the court, and within that you have unwanted pregnancies, people picking on each other, jealousy,” the managing director of a large publisher said. “If you simply translate the court for the school, you have the same jealousies and dramas. The structure of ‘The Tale of Genji’ is essentially the same as a cell-phone novel.”
And so it was, in the spirit of continuity, that the third annual Japan Keitai Novel Award, a contest held by Starts, came to have a “Tale of Genji” theme. In late September, fifteen finalists, selected from a pool of thirty-three hundred and fifty who had submitted novels to the Starts Web site, arrived at a big hotel near Tokyo’s Imperial Palace for the presentation ceremony. They formed a jittery line in a hallway on the second floor: Saya , in a ruched gray dress, had written “? My vanished love child ? fourteen-year-old pregnancy~ . . . What I really need to tell.” White Fig, a graceful young woman with coiffed hair and a netted shawl around her bare shoulders, was the author of “highschoolgirl.co.jp.” A doughy, caramel-skinned high-schooler in a sailor suit, clutching a cell phone adorned with hot-pink charms, stood with her parents. She was Kilala, the author of “I want to meet teacher,” summarized on the press release as “She loved a man who was her teacher, but already married. Yet the love grows for this kind educator.” Kiki (“I’m His Girl”)—orangey hair, tartan-print baby-doll dress, pink patent-leather pumps—stomped around with the prize-pony gait of a runway model, and tried to keep her thigh-high stockings from falling down.
The contestants filed into a large ballroom, with pink chrysanthemum-patterned wall-to-wall carpeting, pink chairs, and a shimmering upside-down-wedding-cake chandelier. Strains of dream-sequence harp music filled the air. Seated near the front was Jakucho Setouchi, an eighty-six-year-old novelist and Buddhist nun, who was acting as an honorary judge. The author of searing autobiographical novels in her youth (before she took her vows, her name was Harumi Setouchi), she is a contributor to Bungakukai and in the mid-nineties published a contemporary-Japanese translation of “Genji” that became a best-seller. She turned around in her chair to greet the audience: flowing purple robe, white-and-gold brocade kesa, shiny bald head.
A government official in a neat suit stood up, and praised the novelists as modern-day Murasakis for their innovative use of 3G cell phones. “The intent of having developed this broadband is for people to use it to create culture, develop new business models, and integrate the provinces into the nation’s cultural production,” he said. “It’s the thousandth anniversary of ‘The Tale of Genji.’ There was a flowering of culture at that time, and we have hopes that in our new era in Japan we will have the same kind of cultural influence. The authors here are leaders of this new flowering of activity.” An announcer on a loudspeaker introduced the finalists, and each stood up and took a shallow bow. “There’s one more author, who does not wish to be seen,” the announcer added. “She’s in the room but doesn’t want to be known.”
Kiki won the grand prize. When her name was called, she looked startled, and slowly turned her head to the left and to the right, remaining lumpen in her chair. Finally, she advanced to the stage, pulling up her stockings and combing her fingers through her hair. She accepted a huge bouquet from a popular Ping-Pong champion. At the microphone, she wept. She said that she had written the novel for her boyfriend, to commemorate their love. The award was two million yen (some twenty thousand dollars) and publication by Starts.
After Kiki left the stage, laden with the flowers and a signed Ping-Pong paddle, Setouchi made an announcement. Since May, she said, she had been posting a novel on the Starts Web site, under the pen name Purple—the reference to Murasaki Shikibu likely sailed over her readers’ heads. Hers was a simple, though well-crafted, tale of a high-school girl, Yuri, who falls in love with a handsome, damaged boy called Hikaru, which is one of Genji’s names. Like Genji, Hikaru has an affair with his father’s wife and gets her pregnant. (Instead of emperor, Hikaru’s father is a corporate executive.) At first, Setouchi said, she had tried to write on her cell phone, but, finding it too difficult, she reverted to her customary medium—traditional Japanese writing paper and a fountain pen—and sent the manuscript to her publisher to convert.
“I’m an author,” Setouchi told the audience. “When you finish a novel, to sell tens of thousands would be a tough thing for us, but I see you selling millions. I must confess that I was a bit jealous in the beginning.” Then she offered them a word of advice that was probably redundant. “I’m eighty-six years old now, and I don’t usually get surprised by things and I don’t get so excited, but as long as you’re alive you want to be excited, right? But how do you stay excited about life? Keep secrets.”
Kiki and her novel were big news. On the social-networking site Mixi, groups organized for and against, debating the merits of her style. The voice of “I’m His Girl” is jivey and loose, unabashedly frank (“Kids? / Well / Twice I got knocked up / By mistake— / Like who asked them to get made / I / Don’t like rubbers / Yeah / For beer and c-cks / Raw is best / You know”), and seasoned with slang expressions, like se-fure, for “sex friend,” and mitaina, a filler word that is the equivalent of “like, you know.” The day after the award, a site offering to “convert your blog into the best cell-phone style in 2008” went up on the Internet. All a user had to do was plug in a URL and push a Send key marked “mitaina” and the text would be transformed into a snaky uneven column of short lines, punctuated with random occurrences of the word mitaina. A message accompanied the translated blogs: “This text was automatically converted to cell-phone novel—here and there line breaks look strange. So what? Mitaina.”
Kiki didn’t go to college. In high school, she got F’s in Japanese. She’s twenty-three now, and lives with her boyfriend in a backwater town in Hokkaido, in northern Japan. She has worked in child care, and recently completed a mail-order course in how to look after the elderly. When I spoke to her after her win, she told me that she had written the book because “I was looking back on a difficult thing I had just come through, and I wanted to get it off my chest.” She said, “Putting it into this form cleared my mind.” In the novel, Aki, the female protagonist, gives up her free-love life style when she falls for a man named Tomo; then she gets pregnant, loses the baby, loses Tomo, and regains Tomo’s love at the story’s end. Kiki said her real name was similar to her heroine’s. “I thought I would be more engaged in the story if her name was close to my own,” she said.
I asked Kiki whether she had read “The Tale of Genji.” “The problem is the language is so difficult,” she said. “There are so many characters.” Then she remembered a book she’d read that was a “super-old one, an ancient one!” She said, “I read it four years ago. Before that, I didn’t read books of any kind, but it was very easy to read, very contemporary, very close to my life.” She told me that the title was “Deep Love.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear
