单项选择题
Text 2
In many respects, Katsura Okiyama is a typical Japanese woman in her 20s. She enjoys spending time with her friends and loves Disney. But, less typically, she is a writer. And, quite exceptionally, her medium is a cell phone.
In Japan, not only are people reading novels on their cell phones; they're also writing novels with them—uploading SMS-length chapters 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. In book form, K, Okiyama's first cell-phone novel, 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.
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 says. "I never had the idea of how a real novel should be, so that might be why I could do it. "
"Cell-phone novels are created and consumed by a generation of young people in Japan that demands to be heard, " says John Possman, an entertainment consultant. "It is truly pop culture. It has also become big business, shaking up a publishing industry whose sales have been declining for a decade. "
Individual voices are hard to find, however. As dictated by the medium, the language of cell-phone novels is simple and peppered with emoticons—signs that represent various attitudes or emotions. Dialogue and description are scarce. Subject matter is always the same. Typically, a heroine loses her first love and then later struggles to find love again.
"The stories are often told in the first person and lack diversity, " agrees Possman. 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 fierce opponent of cell-phone novels. So far, Japan's literary establishment hasn't come up with an answer.
A. settle the dispute between the two sides
B. compete with cell-phone novels
C. adapt to the new technologies
D. change their writing styles