Japanese Cellphone Novels

Wow. The Wall Street Journal this morning has a story about Japanese cellphone novelists, here, along with some excerpts from novels. (If you don't have a WSJ subscription and want to read it, I can email you the article, which will give you access. Let me know.)

The WSJ summarizes three plots and gives excerpts from each:

"What the Angel Gave Me" by Chaco

Summary: Mai Hinata, a 10th-grade high school girl, meets Kagu -- a boy "with a face as beautiful as a girl's" -- through a friend, and gradually falls in love with him. He loves her, too, but misunderstandings get in the way, and they end up dating other people for a while. Mai, unable to bear it any longer, eventually gathers the courage to confess her love to him. She asks Kagu to come see her, but he dies in a motorcycle accident on his way there. Mai finds out five and a half years later that Kagu had broken up with his girlfriend the morning he died and had planned to confess his love for her, too.

"Clearness -- An Eternally Pure Love Story" by Towa

Summary: Sakura is a 20-year-old college student who has sex for money to fund her shopping addiction. After her customers leave her apartment, she spends her time spying on Reo, a young, beautiful and (dyed) blond-haired boy, who works at a male escort service across the street. One day, Reo pays her a visit, and so starts an unlikely friendship. But Reo has a troubled past. He is the son of a prostitute who worked for his current pimp and died before she could repay money that she owed. He himself entered the business when he graduated from junior high school. Though Reo refuses to make love to Sakura (he has a policy of not having sex outside of work), the two fall in love and become inseparable until Reo gets into a fight with Sakura's boyfriend and gets him into a car accident. Reo turns himself in, and Sakura moves to Okinawa to wait for him at their dream destination.

"Love Sky -- A Heartbreaking Love Story" by Mika

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Mika meets Hiro, a tall, intimidating boy with dyed brown hair and countless ear piercings, through a friend. The two start dating, but suffer greatly. First, Mika is gang-raped by some boys sent by Hiro's ex-girlfriend. Then, Mika gets pregnant with Hiro's baby and loses it, to their great sadness. Though Hiro stands by Mika through it all, he starts acting strangely and abruptly breaks up with her. Two and a half years later, she finds out that he is dying from cancer and had broken up with her to protect her from the pain of his death. She rushes to the hospital and spends his last days at his side. After his death, she discovers she's pregnant again, but loses the baby.

(I must be getting old -- I can't imagine reading these, much less on a cellphone. But it's true that my typical fare would make for bad cellphone reading. I do remember seeing a Kurosawa movie in which a young doctor leaves his fiancee because he's contracted syphilis during a medical operation in WWII. She never finds out why he left. I watched it in a movie theater.)