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’