Cell phone novels originate from Japan almost fifteen years ago, where a young man by the name of Yoshi started writing a novel on his cell phone consisting of short chapters that fits in a multimedia email message, sent to friends and then forwarded and spread through word of mouth and other makeshift promotional strategies.
Cell phones in Japan were much more advanced than the Western counterparts back then and were capable of 3G internet networks and email messaging and did not have SMS text limitations. Japanese literature was also very traditional and young adult or teen fiction was virtually nonexistent. With the style and tradition of Japanese blogging which captures the essence of the sparse and ambiguous, context-based casual and personal Japanese language, and youth culture, Yoshi's story started the style we see in English cell phone novels today.
Since Yoshi's "Deep Love", which he financed and made a website for it, and birthed a TV series, movies, manga comics and more, publishers have picked up on this trend and created websites and apps where Japanese users can read and post these stories online under pen names and secret identities, inspiring a culture of serial spontaneity and improvisation, a new generation of aspiring and amateur writers – a majority composed of high school students expressing very personal, emotional, existential and controversial topics that are considered taboo to mention openly in Japanese culture, such as identity, subcultures, relationships, rape, bullying, abortion, friendships and betrayals using sparse colloquial conversational language (while in Japanese it isn't considered to be literature material, it would be however starkly different from "text message lingo" with short forms and abbreviations. It is simply the down to earth, casual, "vulgar", realistic spoken language of pop culture which we may see used in young adult novels these days)
These books have then accumulated millions of reads and readership, published into print form and made into films, TV drama, anime and manga and so on. The top five bestselling books each year in Japan are often cell phone novels. Some famous examples are: "Koizora" (Love Sky), "Akai Ito" (Red String of Fate), "Kimi No Sei" (It's Your Fault), "Moshimo Kimi Ga" (If You) and more: http://hakaiya.com/20101204/movie-12945
Anime and manga often mention cell phone novels or cell phone novelists, most clearly in Watashi Ni XX Shinasai where the main character is a cell phone novelist hiding under a secret identity.
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Intro to Cell Phone Novel Network
RandomYour one stop location on Wattpad for everything about our Cell Phone Novel Network account, our programming, and cell phone novels 「ケータイ小説」 from Japan: what they are, where they come from, how to write one in English, who else is writing one, sampl...
