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In many respects, Katsura Okiyama is a typical Japanese woman in her 20s. The mother of one enjoys spending time with her friends and loves Disney. But, less typically, she is a writer. And, quite exceptionally, her medium is not a PC or even pen and paper. It's her cell phone.

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 realized 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. But "people wrote in asking for a place where they could be expressive and creative," says Akira Tanii, the site's founder. "We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book." Many of the early titles were collaborative products: site members would post reactions to stories while they were being written, and writers would often adapt plots accordingly. Today, there are a million titles in Maho i-Rando's online library — one for every six members, who are mostly women in their teens and 20s. That represents a lot of phone time. "Young Japanese access the Internet more from their cell phones than their PCs," says Misa Matsuda, a professor of literature and sociology at Tokyo's Chuo University. "Cell phones occupy pockets of spare time in people's daily lives — especially for exchanging nonurgent e-mails, playing games, visiting fortune-telling sites. Keitai shosetsu fit in that tradition."

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. It was also greeted as a one-off — the product of a quick-thinking writer-entrepreneur. But Maho i-Rando members soon began pleading with the site's owners to see their favorite stories in hard copy, too, and its first books debuted in 2005. "Mobile novels are created and consumed by a generation of young people in Japan that demands to be heard," says John Possman, former head of Tokyo entertainment consultancy Dragonfly Revolution. "It is truly pop culture." It has also become big business. In major book wholesaler Tohan's 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai shosetsu, including the top three. The new genre is provoking fierce indignation among Japan's literati, many of whom think that keitai shosetsu should stay on cell-phone screens. But it is undeniably shaking up a publishing industry whose sales have been declining for a decade. A professional author of fiction is lucky to sell more than a few thousand copies of a title. A popular cell-phone novelist sells several hundred thousand, and recruitment for new talent is intense. "Find the novelist in you!" online ads cry. "Make your debut!"

Individual voices are hard to find, however. As dictated by the medium, the language of keitai shosetsu is simple and peppered with emoticons. Dialogue and description are sparse. Subject matter is predictable. "Keitai shosetsu are usually about love stories — often romantic relationships experienced by the target audience," says Mari Kuramachi, an editor at Starts. Typically, a heroine loses her first love (in K, the male love interest dies in an accident), then later struggles to find love again. Obstacles can be gritty — rape, drugs, accidental pregnancies and prostitution are all common — but they are invariably overcome, and traumatic events usually serve as devices to bring the heroine and her beau closer together.

"The stories are often told in first-person narrative and lack diversity," agrees Matsuda. But that hasn't been a problem with consumers yet. "Why don't you write a novel and move me?" read one angry schoolgirl's recent online post, in response to a vehement keitai shosetsu detractor. So far, Japan's literary establishment hasn't come up with an answer.

• Lara Day