Dana Goodyear’s “Letter from Japan” in The New Yorker’s end-of-year issue analyzes the Japanese craze for cellphone fiction. The stats make our own e-book business look positively anemic; one publisher alone carries one million “keitai shoshetsu” titles and receives 3.5 billion visits in a single month. Sales of one or two million hardcover reprints of cellphone novels are far from uncommon. “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,” writes Goodyear, who points out just how far the nation has come from “Tales of the Genji,” the earliest known novel written one thousand years ago.

We commented on this phenomenon a while ago (Cell Phone Fiction – Can 20 Million Japanese Be Wrong?) But this seems more than a mere craze. Reading Goodyear’s account, one feels as if one is watching the birth of a new form of communication or the violent formation of a volcanic island. One psychologist interprets it as an outburst of empowerment among long suppressed Japanese women, but concludes that “it just reinforces norms that are popular in male-dominated culture.” Whether it will carry to America’s shores will be interesting to find out.

(Tut-tut of the month to Goodyear for this solecism: “The Japanese publishing industry, which shrunk by more than twenty per cent over the past eleven years, has embraced cell-phone books.” Shrunk? I seldom nitpick grammar, for he who lives by the nitpick perishes by the nitpick. But this is The New Yorker, folks! Someone should have looked the usage up in – er – Shrunk and White.)

In any event, Goodyear’s article is a must-read for all seeking to know the shape of things to come.

RC