Melodramas going mobile

Tragic melodramas - a Japanese entertainment staple for years - are now going mobile, writes David McNeill

In Deep Love, a wildly popular Japanese story of teenage heartbreak, Ayu decides to pay for her boyfriend Yoshiyuki's life-saving heart surgery by prostituting herself. But instead of using the money for an operation, his parents spend it. Ayu dies of Aids.

Steamy melodramas with tear-drenched endings have been a staple of Japanese and Korean popular entertainment for years. But Deep Love, which recently appeared as both a movie and a series on one of the big TV networks, boasts an unusual feature: it began life on a mobile phone.

In just a decade, the keitai, [meaning something you carry with you], has become Japan's most ubiquitous accessory. The number of mobile phone subscribers recently passed 100 million, meaning that apart from children, octogenarians and Luddites, most of the country's 128 million people has at least one.

With some of the longest commutes in the world, the city's trains were once packed with rows of heads sheltering behind fat books and broadsheet newspapers. These days, however, commuters can increasingly be found squinting into glowing screens.

Standard mobile phone features include internet browsers, games and digital cameras, while newer models can be used to watch TV, swipe ticket barriers and pay bills. And with bigger screens and faster downloads, haiku, manga comics and now full graphic novels are increasingly viable.

Four years ago, a publisher called Starts took advantage of this technology and began selling Deep Love as a download, persuading thousands of young, mainly female readers to log on. Another Starts story, Koizora, was later released in hardback and went on to sell 1.2 million copies: Japan's first million-selling mobile phone novel.

Koizora is due for release as a movie later this year. Meanwhile, Starts is collecting entries for the first cellular-phone novel prize this August.

Established book publishers with flat sales are learning that if young readers are not going to come to them, they'll have to take their product to the readers.

Kadokawa Publishing, for example, recently put many of its older titles online and found that they were popular with women in their 20s and 30s on late-night commutes.

"It's convenient when I need a change of mood after work. Bookstores are usually closed when I get home," a 28-year-old reader told the Nikkei newspaper.

Thousands of titles can now be accessed for about 290-450 yen (about €1.77-€2.74); cheaper than a paperback and without the added bulk in handbags and briefcases. The e-books can be accessed for two or three months before the subscription lapses.

Estimating the value of this new market, which didn't exist five years ago, is not easy. The Nikkei recently claimed sales of e-books had topped nine billion yen (about €55 million) in 2005, half of which was accounted for by mobile phones. That figure is likely to have at least doubled since then.

The trend is not without its critics who say the truncated, slang-rich content of new keitai-novels hardly qualifies as writing, let alone literature.

Others ponder the cost on eyes and necks of squinting into those tiny screens for hours on end.

But in a country famous for incubating new technological trends, it is only a matter of time before someone engineers a way out of these problems.

Consumer electronics giant Matsushita, for example, recently developed a 5.6-inch, high-resolution colour screen called Words Gear reader, specifically designed for reading e-books. The company has formed a joint venture with Kadokawa Publishing to release 400 titles.