JAPAN:A singer-songwriter has astonished literary conservatives, writes David McNeillin Tokyo
LIKE MANY mothers and daughters, Makiko and Midoriko don't always get on. Makiko, a hostess on the cusp of middle-age, is worn out from single-handedly raising her teenage girl.
Midoriko, herself on the brink of adulthood, lives in fear that she will end up like her exhausted mum and communicates only in writing. Guilt and resentment curdle their relationship as Makiko ponders the one move she thinks will restart her life, breast implants.
Such is the plot of Japan's newest literary sensation, Breasts and Eggs, originally written as a blog by Mieko Kawakami in the choppy vernacular of Japan's freewheeling western city, Osaka.
The little known singer- songwriter has astonished literary conservatives by bagging the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most coveted award for new authors. The prize is the latest sign that Japan leads the world in a new writing genre: blog-lit.
Japanese is now the top language of the blogosphere, with roughly 37 per cent of posts worldwide, according to a 2007 survey by blog search engine Technorati.
About 70 million people in Japan use mobile phones daily to surf the net, many during notoriously long commutes. Inevitably, some have started to read and even write novels on their handsets.
Half of last year's top-10 bestselling novels originated from the (very) small screen and the top three books were all written by novice mobile-phone authors. One bestselling novel was tapped into a phone while the young author commuted to work.
The genre, which has gurgled up into Japan's cloistered literary world, has thrown up a raft of young stars, including 21-year-old Rin, who has sold nearly half a million copies of her high-school love story If you . . . since it was published last year.
However the speed of this ascent and the genre's apparent lack of respect for Japan's 1,000- year literary tradition have unnerved traditionalists. Tokyo's governor Shintaro Ishihara, himself once a young literary upstart and Akutagawa-winner, called Kawakami's novella "unpleasant and intolerable".
Others though have defended the book's success. "Her popularity is part of the phenomenon of confessional fiction of the Japanese chick-lit variety, where the writer is very frank about sex and personal, especially family, relationships," says Japan-based author and critic Roger Pulvers.
Some critics have noted that Ishihara was himself criticised for the rebellious content of his 1955 winner, Season of the Sun.
Bjork-loving Kawakami (31) began blogging five years ago in a bid to flag one of her three CDs, but her brand of style quickly won admirers and, at one stage, she had 200,000 hits a day.
In the drawling, slang-rich Osaka dialect - a rough equivalent might be Liverpool Scouse - Breasts and Eggs explores the tension between two generations of women as one contemplates physical decline, the other her entry into womanhood, and the loss of control it implies. The book has sold 110,000 copies and there are plans for a movie.
She says she was drawn to blogs by their openness and the instant response from readers. "You know right away when you've written something that's drawing interest," she said recently.
True to her origins, Kawakami has little time for the stuffy language of literary convention. When she won the Akutagawa Prize, she said in her native Osaka, "Mesanko, ureshii," meaning: "I'm dead chuffed."