Believe it or not, but news just out provides the startling revelation that half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of this year -- That's hard-bound tomes -- were written on cell phone keyboards. While a new Japanese translation of "The Brothers Karamazov" racked up impressive sales of 320,000 copies since July, the top thumb-typed novels, like "Moshimo Kimiga" ("If You ..."), the story of a high-school girl's fight with HIV, averaged sales of 400,000 books. The author of the 142-page "Moshimo Kimiga" is a 21-year-old nursery school teacher from Kokura who writes under the nom de phone Rin, and who originally posted the work to the Web in installments. "I typed it all on my mobile phone," she explained. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long. The mobile-phone novels, or "keitai shousetsu," are usually written for an audience of young female readers. ... The stories traverse teen romance, sex and drugs in a succession of one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone. Scene and character development are notably missing. The size of the screen also necessitates short, simple sentences with basic words. Which means that a long tradition of Japanese literature will eventually disappear, to be replaced by smiling emoticons. Sayonara!
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Imagine getting Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire down to three screens and a smiley face!
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