Wakarimasen

That's one of the few Japanese phrases I retain from reading Shogun a long time ago: I don't understand. Years ago Japanese schoolgirls texting to each other on their cell phones seemed bizarre to me, but today I'm texting quite a few times a day. I can't believe, though, that this new trend is going to catch on here:

Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed [...] on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies.

In just a few years, mobile phone novels - or keitai shousetsu - have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.

Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers - who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing.

I'm pretty sure James Clavell could not have written Shogun on a cell phone.