In Japan, not only are people reading novels on their cell phones; they’re also writing novels with them — uploading SMS-length installments to specialist websites where they are in turn downloaded to the phones of millions of readers. The most popular are printed as books and sell in the hundreds of thousands. Okiyama’s first keitai shosetsu or ‘cell-phone novel,’ K, was written on her 3G Sharp handset and finished with a speed that would have left Barbara Cartland eating her literary dust. In book form, it is 235 pages long. “I think I was writing 20 pages in two hours per day at the most, and it took me almost a month,” she says. “I wrote while my baby slept.”

Although she was used to writing around 100 text messages daily, Okiyama never expected that thumbing her keypad would enable her to become one of the country’s hot new writers. “I had never written a story,” she admits. “I had never liked reading either.” But when a close friend offered her own life experiences to Okiyama as the basis for a keitai shosetsu, Okiyama realised that she had everything she needed at her fingertips. “I never had the idea of how an authentic novel should be, so that might be why I could do it,” she says. “I simply wrote like I text.” Using the pseudonym Momo, she posted K — about a bar hostess who gives birth to her client’s child — in brief chapters on the keitai shosetsu website Gocco. It was voted the site’s most popular title, and went on to win first prize in a TV-sponsored keitai shosetsu competition — landing the Saitama homemaker over $9,000 and a book deal with Tokyo publisher Starts.

The Internet has been formative in the evolution of Japan’s latest literary genre. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones...

It was a male writer known as Yoshi who had the idea of bringing out the first keitai shosetsu in book form, however, and in doing so, became one of the first to break away from the pack. His self-published Deep Love (2002) was a collection of racy tales about a teenage prostitute in Tokyo that had previously appeared online. As a book, it sold 2.5 million copies and became a manga, a TV series and a film.

Excerpted from an article by Lara Day in the January 21 issue of ‘Time’