Girls Just Want To Have Fun: The Portrayal of Girls’ Rebellion in Mobile Phone Novels

The rise of kētai shōsetsu—digital novels written and shared on mobile phones, predominantly by girls—in the late 2000s caught the attention of Japanese critics and journalists, as a new literary phenomenon that was taking the world of Japanese girls’ literature by storm. In 2008, journalist Kenrō Hayamizu published a book titled Kētai shōsetsuteki: ‘sai yankīka’ jidai no shōjotachi [‘Mobile Phone Novels: Girls in the Re-Yankifi cation Era’], in which he draws a parallel between mobile phone novels and the yankī culture that has its roots in 1980s youth culture. In this pioneering work, Hayamizu interpreted the emergence of the mobile phone novel as a sign of a yankī cultural revival. Although there is undoubtedly a strong parallel between mobile phone novels and yankī culture, the argument that this is simply a ‘revival’ of the 1980s rebellious youth culture significantly undermines the role that girls play in the cultural production of such novels. Using the Wild Beast series [2009–2010] by Yū as a case study, this paper argues that the girls writing and reading mobile phone novels are reimagining yankī culture as their own.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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