Skip to main content

Featured Post

Conversation starter?

Questions are good things. They are there to get to know others and to find the common ground with each other, with the people we want to love. Well, I would think that the biggest thing I need to learn is to love myself. I think at least. I like lists, I make lists, mainly about anime and manga that I want to read and watch. And sometimes about American books too. My life does revolve around things that I consume. And I do not know if I am fine with that. I would like to fancy myself that I like philosophy, but in truth, I like the idea of philosophy. In the sense, philosophy means the love of knowledge, because we cannot know everything. So we need to start with things that we do not know, even though there are many famous figures in philosophy, I do not want to read from them. Because the biggest thing that I do not know if myself. And, as I am right now, I am more interested in filling the emptiness in me, if that makes sense. But I like questions. So, I went out and looked for que

Cell phone novel

"Phone novels started out primarily read and authored by young women on the subject of romantic fiction such as relationships, lovers, rape, love triangles, and pregnancy. However, mobile phone novels are gaining worldwide popularity on broader subjects." - Wikipedia.

As it stands right now, the cell phone novel is the first genre of art that had come out of the new age starting with around 2000 and still going strong, having many famous titles published in book format as well. Cell phone novels are enjoyed all over the world.


The nice thing about art is that it always finds a way to do what it wants to do. And I am happy that this can be said about the writers around the world. I always had deep respect towards communities that are none profit and keep themselves up as a team.

"The first cell phone novel was “published” in Japan in 2003 by a Tokyo man in his mid-thirties who calls himself Yoshi. His first cell phone novel was called Deep Love, the story of a teenager engaged in "subsidized dating" (enjō kosai) in Tokyo and contracting AIDS. It became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a television series, a manga, and a movie." - Wikipedia.

Writers of cell phone novels are mainly the younger generation who are writing content that resonates with their peers. That's why the majority of the readers are younger too. The majority of the readers, writers are young women, so if someone wants to categorize it, you could put it on women's fiction (I have no idea how categories work... you can tell). It was a subculture for young people by young people, then it had grown out. This is kind of something that is happening with the fanfiction community. In fanfiction, you write what young people are interested in, with the gentleness and understanding that only young people can have and get called lazy for not doing anything else. Then you get to an age where it is profitable to publish these works, with a little help and with a little name change.  Right here I am thinking about Fifty shade of Grey, a Twilight fanfiction, and another book, After, a One Direction fanfiction.

It is a raw and unedited genre of writing that you rarely can get nowadays in the well-polished works that we see in books and magazines. There is a nice feeling to it even when you are only learning about it. I feel bad that I don't know any Japanese, I want to read

The similarities between fanfiction and cell phone novels are interesting. And I looked into the website Maho iLand that has a collection of novels that can be accessed for free, even though the majority of them are on Japanese. This web site is the most popular

if you are interested here is the siteミ★ https://maho.jp/

"Because of the short chapter format consisting of around 70-100 words (usually fewer than 200), the phenomenon has brought a new approach to literature, allowing a new vision to potentially redefine traditional writing and the publishing world. Despite the use of cell phones, most of these novels are not written with SMS slang and language. Instead, it has brought out a new era of minimalism and art. In each chapter, readers will be able to experience narration, poetry and even visual arts in the use of carefully chosen line breaks, punctuation, rhythm and white space." - Wikipedia.

These novels are designed to be read on the phone, this gives it a distinctive appearance and a  challenge in formating. The nature of the writing and the reading too is a do as you go, but because of that, they need to have to make sure that the chapters are satisfying enough and make the readers want to come back for more. And I can only guess that because of the shortness of the chapters, it mostly focuses on character building and action, rather than world-building. A lot of the stories, just by looking at the popular theme are happening in the contemporary world.

I love innovative things like that - they had taken something that would have been a limitation and decided to make it into a strength.

"Takatsu, in 2008, pioneered the English cell phone novel and brought over the phenomenon from Japan after watching Japanese television dramas like Koizora, Akai Ito and various. Like many fans of Japanese entertainment, he realized they were originally cell phone novels. After research and reading cell phone novels, discovering there were no English cell phone novels and seeing the potential of the literary form, he came across Textnovel.com (the first site in North America to recognize cell phone novels)." - stakatu.com

The cell phone novels are not a bygone genre, on the website Maho iLand there are still novels being written, published and read. This is truly magical.

.✫*゚・゚。.☆.*。・゚✫*.

It is funny, that I had realized that information about cell phone novels and where are they going is still limited and rehashes the same information over and over again. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0IQC8Vxmc) There is this video that just tells us the same back story, and the description down there is the same. So there is nothing that really changed between 2008 and 2018 (when this video was updated) meaning that this genre is rigid, or that it is still relatively niche for us in the west.

The first western cell phone novel site is textnovel. The original site no longer can be reached, however, the blog that I can suspect was accompanying the original site, it is inactive since 2014, that was the last post, I can suspect that that was the time when textnovel went out of commission. Portions of the site can be reached with the way back machine.

.✫*゚・゚。.☆.*。・゚✫*.

As I am wandering around the net, it is clear that the only site that archives these novels is the previously named Maho iLand. It is fairly hard to find English speaking cell phone novels around the net. Or if there are any, they are dead.

As it seems, the timeline is the following. It started around 2000-2003 with the first novels published in Japan. 2007-2010 are the times when it reaches the west and there is interest, however, there are others who report on it way before that. However, no interest and community could keep it up and make it live. Around 2014 textnovel blacks out and the west forgets about the genre. Meanwhile in Japan is still going strong.

Source:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Bungaku Shoujo" Movie - Review

Score: 9/10 The review contains spoilers. "Bungaku Shoujo" Movie, is the movie adaptation from Production I.G, directed and storyboarded by Tada Shunsuke. This movie adapted the fifth volume of the light novel series: "Bungaku Shoujo" to Doukoku no Palmier according to myanimelist. The series of "Bungaku Shoujo" is broader, having a long-running light novel series and a manga series written by Nomura Mizuki. That saying, this movie is an adaptation of a smart part of a larger story and a lot of things can be explained away with that. However, I don't think that it will take away from the enjoyment of the adaptation to people who had read the original. Tada Shunsuke had directed World Destruction: Sekai Bokumetsu no Rokunin, an anime that I had watched with the English dub, but one that I hadn't regretted it. This was a pleasant surprise for me since I will definitely talk about that series too in a positive note. This means that as a director Tada

"0" Review

Long story short: 5/10 pretty decent and middle of the road. Music videos come in many forms and shapes  and form and animation is one of them. In my opinion, a disappointing animation is worse than a disappointing live-action; even though the focal point of a music video is on the music .  The most important thing is clearly the music, the animation here is a kind of bonus experience. I say this because this music video is hard to find on the internet, so I couldn’t re-watch it. (I decided to include "0" because this was between the first short anime music videos that I had watched when I started to watch anime more regularly. And I couldn't leave it without a word.)  Because, if this I based my writing on memory alone, and the recounting of other people writing about this animation. H owever, understanding the things  that go into making a music video is important . While you can judge the animation on of itself, it is needed to be understood that many things go into th

"Aoi" Hikaru ga Chikyuu ni Ita Koro...... - Review

The quasi-delinquent Akagi Koremitsu ends up being haunted by a schoolmate of his, Mikado Hikaru he is stopped into fulfilling one last promise that Hikaru had made. Otherwise, Hikaru's spirit can't rest in peace. However, Saotome Aoi is mad at Hikaru and wouldn't have anything to do with the feared Koremitsu. I decided to write my thought as I go in reading the manga since even though I find it decent I don't have much hope to it being something that would impress me too much. The art of the manga is beautiful and simplistic. Here I mostly mean the characters, the two leads, Koremitsu and Hikaru are complete opposites of each other and that is shown nicely in the rendering of the characters. The background is something that should have gotten a little bit more polishing, it is boring to look at but helps to make the characters pop out more. However, this runs the risk of the arts seemingly being uninspired and hard to remember. It is interesting. You can skip ahead pas