American Author Finds Audience on Japanese Mobile Phones

By Ron Hogan on January 9, 2008 12:32 PM

Last month, the subject of fiction written to be read on mobile phones came up, specifically its huge success with Japanese audiences. One of the authors they’re reading is Barry Yourgrau, who will be sharing some of those stories with English-speaking audiences tonight at the Bryant Park Kinokuniya (6th Ave between 40th and 41st).

For Yourgrau, who first became entranced by the possibilities after observing young Tokyo citizens with their phones during a 2002 visit, writing for cellphone screens was a progression from the “sudden fiction” he’d been writing all along—”only shorter,” he recalls. With the help of his Japanese translator (who also works on Paul Auster and Richard Powers) and an enthusiastic young editor, Yourgrau began crafting stories with a 350-word cap, with opening sentences less than a dozen words long so they’d fit on the screen. He came up with 78 stories that were read by over 100,000 people online before being collected in I-mode Keitai Stories (some of them were later revised and presented to American children in Yet Another NASTYbook).

“Writing for cellphones was like a little narrative laboratory,” Yourgrau says of the experience. “A real technical narrative challenge, and a liberation: [I was] forced to compress & tell story (after story) freshly from different angles & with different techniques, forced… to cut away to the essentials. As Kafka wonderfully put it, “Sorry this letter so long, if I had more time it would have been shorter.” Some tales could operate like quick (even racy) jokes; or imagist prose-poems (I dusted off a few from very old notebooks). Others, I’d to really have challenge my full bag of narrative tricks to keep things unrepetitive.” Want a quick glimpse? Six of Yourgrau’s keitai stories are on his blog.