承前*1
Richard Lloyd Parry “It ws bst f tms, it ws wrst f tms: Japan's mobile phone literature” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3005052.ece
浅野智彦さん経由で知る。こちらは昨年12月初めの記事。米国ではcellphone novel、英国ではmobile novelか。
面白かったのは、地下鉄の駅と駅との間隔に絡めているところ；
そういえば、1980年代に『フォーカス』とか『フライデー』といった写真週刊誌が出てきた頃、記事の長さなどがやはり駅と駅との間隔を考慮してデザインされているとか言われていなかったか。
The new dominance of mobile novels - keitai shosetsu in Japanese - is all the more remarkable for the speed with which it has come about. They did not exist in 2002, but the following year online sales were worth 1.8 billion yen (£8 million). By 2006, the figure has risen to 9.4 billion yen (£42 million). They owe their success to the popularity of the mobile phone among young Japanese, who were taking photographs, surfing the internet and sending emails on their keitai long before their peers in the West.Several publishers operate mobile novel websites from which phone users can download novels for a subscription of about 300 yen (£1.33) a month. The stories are divided into gobbets which can be read in about three minutes, the typical distance between two stops on the Japanese subway.
また、鈴木謙介氏のコメントもあり；
この中の cornyという言葉、鈴木さんが使ったものか、それとも Parry氏による和文英訳なのかはわからない。cornyはつまらない、陳腐、感傷的ということになるのだろけど、直訳すれば玉蜀黍っぽいということで、田吾作なという意味もあり。
The principal characters of the stories, like their readers, tend to be young city dwellers. Tragedies, in the form of bullying, rape, murder and infection by HIV, strike them with terrible regularity. “The typical storylines of keitai shosetsu are corny,” says the sociologist Kensuke Suzuki. “It is a world of right and wrong, and is quite un-literary.”
ところで、このタイトルはケータイ英語？
