新“形”小說──手機小說
Satomi Nakamura使用手機時﹐必須加倍留意﹐避免經常停頓。這是因為她使用手機不僅僅是為了聊天。現年22歲的Satomi Nakamura是位家庭主婦﹐她最近剛剛寫作完成了一本200頁的小說。這部名為《重新愛上你》的小說完全用手機完成﹐Nakamura寫作時﹐用右手 拇指按鍵﹐小指固定手機。她工作得廢寢忘食﹐以致於上個月右手小指的一條血管破裂了。
Nakamura柔聲說道﹐在電腦上打字可能更容易 些﹐但是她從6年級開始就使用手機了﹐所以對她來說﹐用手機更容易。到目前為止﹐Nakamura已經使用手機完成了8本小說。她每天都會對手頭那部講述 一對青梅竹馬在高中重逢的小說進行更新﹐這本小說有2,000多名網絡讀者。
在日本﹐ 手機正在使平靜已久的小說市場風雲再起。20歲左右的年輕業餘作者們很久之前就已掌握了如何用手機收發電子郵件、撰寫博客文章﹐現在又發現手機這種便利的 媒介能讓他們發揮自己的創造力﹐把作品放到互聯網上。對讀者來說(大部分是十幾歲的女孩子﹐她們用手機做各種各樣的事情﹐從寫群日志到聽音樂)﹐這種被稱 為手機小說的新体裁﹐是一種正在興起的最新娛樂形式。
大部分手機小說都沒有經過精雕細琢﹐它們語言簡單﹐場景單一﹐而且幾乎總是圍繞著愛 情和友情這種大眾熟悉的主題。儘管如此﹐這類小說卻非常受歡迎﹐出版商也欣喜若狂。據Research Institute for Publications統計﹐1996年至2006年﹐日本的紙質圖書銷量下降了15%。
有些手機小說還被印刷出版﹐銷量達數百萬冊﹐ 高踞暢銷書排行榜之首。《愛情天空》是目前為止最成功的手機小說之一﹐它講述了一個患有癌癥的男孩為了不讓女友因自己死去而痛苦﹐主動與她分手了。目前此 書銷量已達130萬冊﹐而且還被改編成電影﹐預計將於11月在日本各大影院上映。
很多手機小說的風格受到伴隨這些年輕作者成長的漫畫書的影響。這就意味著此類小說中會有很多對話和非常簡短的段落﹐很適合在小屏幕上顯示。句子之間大片的空白可以表現出此時此刻人物正陷於深思之中。
在《重新愛上你》中﹐高中生Shuhei把與他青梅竹馬的Kaori領到一間空教室﹐想在上課之前有些獨處的時間﹐這時卻有人從外面鎖上了門。接下來的情景是這樣的﹕
上課鈴響。
(空白)
上課鈴響。
(空白)
“嘆息。我們要翹課了。”
(空白)
她表情不悅地說道。
上文所述那位小指受傷的家庭主婦Nakamura表示﹐這是為了在讀者的腦海中展現一個電影屏幕﹐把上面的圖像轉化成語言。
手 機小說的出現大約是在7年前。當時﹐基於社區的網站Maho i-Land推出了一些易於使用的功能﹐用戶可為自己寫的故事配上封面並分章節﹐使其就像真正的書一樣。大約3年前﹐電話運營商開始提供高速手機上網業務 ﹐並下調了數據傳輸費用﹐實行統一價格﹐之後手機小說就開始了飛速發展。手機用戶可以不限時的上網﹐而每月費用不到50美元。
現 有600萬名會員的Maho i-Land表示﹐在實行統一價格後﹐手機上網費用減少了一半﹐在此之前該網站上的網絡小說只有30萬本左右﹐而現在超過了100萬本。日本最大的手機運 營商NTT移動通訊(NTT DoCoMo Inc.)援引行業數據稱﹐今年手機小說和手機動漫服務的銷售額預計將增長一倍以上﹐從去年的約9,000萬美元上升到2億美元。
手機小 說作者們喜歡即時地獲得讀者反饋﹐這可以鼓勵他們繼續寫下去﹐他們甚至會改變故事的情節發展來迎合讀者。當然﹐讀者和作者之間的密切互動有時會太過頻繁。 現年27歲的女作者Chaco(筆名)兩年前寫了一個名為《天使給了我什麼》的悲情愛情故事﹐曾經非常受歡迎﹐每天有25,000名讀者上網瀏覽。但是不 願透露自己真實姓名的Chaco表示﹐她也感到壓力很大﹐為了取悅讀者﹐她每天都要進行更新﹐並回復讀者的評論。
身材嬌小、衣著整洁的Chaco說﹐她每晚只能睡一兩個小時。她的手機會在凌晨4點因粉絲們發來的短信而響鈴。最後她把自己在Maho i-Land網站上的網頁移到了一個私人網站上﹐為的是能更好控制讀者的反饋過程。
網 絡上最受歡迎的手機小說在書店裡也往往會熱銷。東京一家小型出版社Starts Publishing Corp.就是最早從出版手機小說中獲利的商家之一﹐當時Chaco的一個粉絲打電話來﹐懇求他們出版她最喜歡的小說。這本小說銷售了44萬冊。 Starts Publishing Corp.和其他幾家出版社已經出版了20多本Maho i-Land上最流行的小說。
為了提高銷 量﹐出版社會特別注意書的裝幀設計﹐因為有些讀者買書並不是為了閱讀﹐而是為了收藏。《晴朗》講述的是一個妓女和一個男妓之間的愛情故事﹐書的封面覆有一 個透明的皮書套﹐上面畫著一條床單。為了保持作者的神秘性﹐並使那些以親身經歷為素材寫作的人能保護其隱私﹐出版商鼓勵作者不要暴露自己的真實身份。
有 些紙質小說作者﹐比如現年37歲﹐以大膽描寫性、愛和單身母親著稱的Yuzuki Muroi卻對手機小說嗤之以鼻。在去年一個手機小說獲獎作者頒獎典禮上﹐Muroi明確表示了對這種体裁的不認同。她說﹐不幸的是手機小說中充斥了對話 和心理描寫﹐而幾乎沒有背景、場景或人物發展。
Muroi是去年手機小說比賽的一位評委。她的發言人稱﹐Muroi拒絕參加今年的評審。
儘管如此﹐手機小說的粉絲們表示﹐優秀的手機小說會讓讀者欲罷不能。現在還不清楚手機小說能流行多久﹐也不知道根據親身經歷寫小說的作者們有一天會不會江郎才盡。
但有些手機小說作者已決心不讓這種情況發生。Chaco希望可以將寫作變成一種職業﹐並表示她正努力完善自己的風格。
Chaco談到﹐她從前都是一想到什麼﹐就會不加思索地寫出來﹐但現在她會更加注意故事情節的發展﹐而不是對話。
Yukari Iwatani Kane
A Novel Approach -- Via Cellphone
WHEN SATOMI Nakamura uses her cellphone, she has to be extra careful to take frequent breaks. That is because she isn't just chatting. The 22-year-old homemaker has recently finished writing a 200-page novel titled 'To Love You Again' entirely on her tiny cellphone screen, using her right thumb to tap the keys and her pinkie to hold the phone steady. She got so carried away last month that she broke a blood vessel on her right little finger.
'PCs might be easier to type on, but I've had a cellphone since I was in sixth grade, so it's easier for me to use,' says the soft-spoken Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone. More than 2,000 readers followed her latest story, about childhood sweethearts who reunite in high school, as she updated it every day on an Internet site.
In Japan, the cellphone is stirring the nation's long-staid fiction market. Young amateur writers in their teens and 20s who long ago mastered the art of zapping off emails and blogs on their cellphones, find it a convenient medium in which to loose their creative energies and get their stuff onto the Internet. For readers, mostly teenage girls who use their phones for an increasingly wide range of activities from writing group diaries to listening to music, the mobile novel, as the genre is called, is the latest form of entertainment on the go.
Most of these novels are unpolished, with simple language and skimpy scene-setting. They are almost always on familiar themes about love and friendship. Nonetheless, they are hugely popular, and publishers are delighted. Book sales in Japan fell 15% between 1996 and 2006, according to the Research Institute for Publications.
Several of these cellphone novels have been turned into real books, selling millions of copies and topping the best-seller lists. One of the biggest successes so far: 'Love Sky,' about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her the pain of his death, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is being made into a movie due out in November.
The style of many mobile novels is influenced by comic books the young writers grew up reading. That means lots of dialogue and really short paragraphs, which fit nicely on a small screen. Huge empty spaces between sentences can convey that the characters are deep in thought.
In 'To Love You Again,' Shuhei, a high-school boy, ushers his childhood sweetheart, Kaori, into an empty science room for a moment of privacy before class when someone locks the door. The following sequence goes like this:
Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
'Sigh. We're missing class'
(space)
She said with an annoyed expression.
The trick is to envision a movie screen inside your head and translate those images into words, says Ms. Nakamura, the housewife with the sore pinkie.
Mobile novels started about seven years ago when the community-based Web site, Maho i-Land, began offering easy-to-use features that let users write a story with a cover page and chapters like a real book. The trend really took off about three years ago, after phone operators began offering high-speed mobile Internet and affordable flat-rate plans for transmitting data. That allowed users to access the Internet as much as they wanted to for less than $50 a month.
Maho i-Land, which is now bustling with six million members, says the number of mobile novels on its site has jumped to more than a million today from about 300,000 before the flat-rate plans cut phone bills in half. According to industrywide data cited by NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cellphone operator, sales from mobile book and comic services are expected to more than double this year, to more than $200 million from about $90 million last year.
Mobile-novel writers like getting instant feedback from readers. That encourages them to keep going or even to change the story to suit readers. Of course, the close interaction between reader and writer can sometimes be too much. A 27-year-old woman, who wrote a sad love story called 'What the Angel Gave Me' under the pen name Chaco, became so popular two years ago that she had 25,000 unique online visitors a day. But Chaco, who won't disclose her real name, says she also felt pressured to update her novel and respond to comments every day to keep her readers happy.
'I was getting only one to two hours of sleep a night,' says Chaco, a petite, neatly dressed woman. Her phone was ringing with email messages from fans at 4 a.m. She eventually moved her Web page off the Maho i-Land's Web site onto a private site, where she has more control over the feedback process.
The novels with the most online readers also tend to sell well in the bookstores. Starts Publishing Corp., a small Tokyo publisher, was one of the first to take advantage of this genre when a Chaco fan called up and begged the company to turn her favorite story into a book. It sold 440,000 copies. Starts and a few other firms have turned more than two dozen of the most heavily accessed stories on Maho i-Land into real books.
To boost sales, publishers have paid special attention to book design because some readers buy them as mementos rather than to read. 'Clearness,' a romantic tale of a female and male prostitute, has a transparent book jacket overlaid on the cover with the image of a bed sheet. To preserve the mystique of the authors and to protect the privacy of authors who have written stories based on their personal experience, publishers encourage them to keep their real identities a secret.
Some published authors like Yuzuki Muroi, a 37-year-old known for her blunt essays on sex, love and single motherhood, scoff at the new genre. At an award ceremony for prize-winning mobile novelists last year, Ms. Muroi made clear her disapproval. 'What is unfortunate is that your stories are mostly a string of conversation and emotion, and there is almost no setting, scene, or character development,' she said.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Muroi, who was one of the judges for the contest last year, says she declined to participate this year.
Still, fans of mobile novels say the best of them are absorbing to read. It isn't clear yet how much staying power the genre will have, or whether authors who have written stories based on their own experiences will run out of ideas.
But some mobile novelists are determined to not let that happen. Chaco wants to turn writing into a career and says she is trying to improve her style.
'I used to write whatever came to my mind without giving it much thought,' she says. 'But now I think a lot more about story development rather than dialogue.'
Yukari Iwatani Kane
'PCs might be easier to type on, but I've had a cellphone since I was in sixth grade, so it's easier for me to use,' says the soft-spoken Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone. More than 2,000 readers followed her latest story, about childhood sweethearts who reunite in high school, as she updated it every day on an Internet site.
In Japan, the cellphone is stirring the nation's long-staid fiction market. Young amateur writers in their teens and 20s who long ago mastered the art of zapping off emails and blogs on their cellphones, find it a convenient medium in which to loose their creative energies and get their stuff onto the Internet. For readers, mostly teenage girls who use their phones for an increasingly wide range of activities from writing group diaries to listening to music, the mobile novel, as the genre is called, is the latest form of entertainment on the go.
Most of these novels are unpolished, with simple language and skimpy scene-setting. They are almost always on familiar themes about love and friendship. Nonetheless, they are hugely popular, and publishers are delighted. Book sales in Japan fell 15% between 1996 and 2006, according to the Research Institute for Publications.
Several of these cellphone novels have been turned into real books, selling millions of copies and topping the best-seller lists. One of the biggest successes so far: 'Love Sky,' about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her the pain of his death, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is being made into a movie due out in November.
The style of many mobile novels is influenced by comic books the young writers grew up reading. That means lots of dialogue and really short paragraphs, which fit nicely on a small screen. Huge empty spaces between sentences can convey that the characters are deep in thought.
In 'To Love You Again,' Shuhei, a high-school boy, ushers his childhood sweetheart, Kaori, into an empty science room for a moment of privacy before class when someone locks the door. The following sequence goes like this:
Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
'Sigh. We're missing class'
(space)
She said with an annoyed expression.
The trick is to envision a movie screen inside your head and translate those images into words, says Ms. Nakamura, the housewife with the sore pinkie.
Mobile novels started about seven years ago when the community-based Web site, Maho i-Land, began offering easy-to-use features that let users write a story with a cover page and chapters like a real book. The trend really took off about three years ago, after phone operators began offering high-speed mobile Internet and affordable flat-rate plans for transmitting data. That allowed users to access the Internet as much as they wanted to for less than $50 a month.
Maho i-Land, which is now bustling with six million members, says the number of mobile novels on its site has jumped to more than a million today from about 300,000 before the flat-rate plans cut phone bills in half. According to industrywide data cited by NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cellphone operator, sales from mobile book and comic services are expected to more than double this year, to more than $200 million from about $90 million last year.
Mobile-novel writers like getting instant feedback from readers. That encourages them to keep going or even to change the story to suit readers. Of course, the close interaction between reader and writer can sometimes be too much. A 27-year-old woman, who wrote a sad love story called 'What the Angel Gave Me' under the pen name Chaco, became so popular two years ago that she had 25,000 unique online visitors a day. But Chaco, who won't disclose her real name, says she also felt pressured to update her novel and respond to comments every day to keep her readers happy.
'I was getting only one to two hours of sleep a night,' says Chaco, a petite, neatly dressed woman. Her phone was ringing with email messages from fans at 4 a.m. She eventually moved her Web page off the Maho i-Land's Web site onto a private site, where she has more control over the feedback process.
The novels with the most online readers also tend to sell well in the bookstores. Starts Publishing Corp., a small Tokyo publisher, was one of the first to take advantage of this genre when a Chaco fan called up and begged the company to turn her favorite story into a book. It sold 440,000 copies. Starts and a few other firms have turned more than two dozen of the most heavily accessed stories on Maho i-Land into real books.
To boost sales, publishers have paid special attention to book design because some readers buy them as mementos rather than to read. 'Clearness,' a romantic tale of a female and male prostitute, has a transparent book jacket overlaid on the cover with the image of a bed sheet. To preserve the mystique of the authors and to protect the privacy of authors who have written stories based on their personal experience, publishers encourage them to keep their real identities a secret.
Some published authors like Yuzuki Muroi, a 37-year-old known for her blunt essays on sex, love and single motherhood, scoff at the new genre. At an award ceremony for prize-winning mobile novelists last year, Ms. Muroi made clear her disapproval. 'What is unfortunate is that your stories are mostly a string of conversation and emotion, and there is almost no setting, scene, or character development,' she said.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Muroi, who was one of the judges for the contest last year, says she declined to participate this year.
Still, fans of mobile novels say the best of them are absorbing to read. It isn't clear yet how much staying power the genre will have, or whether authors who have written stories based on their own experiences will run out of ideas.
But some mobile novelists are determined to not let that happen. Chaco wants to turn writing into a career and says she is trying to improve her style.
'I used to write whatever came to my mind without giving it much thought,' she says. 'But now I think a lot more about story development rather than dialogue.'
Yukari Iwatani Kane
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