In Deep Love, a wildly popular Japanese story of teenage heartbreak, Ayu prostitutes herself to raise money for her boyfriend Yoshiyuki's life-saving heart surgery. But instead of using her contribution to pay for the operation, his parents spend it and Ayu dies of Aids.
Steamy melodramas with tear-drenched endings have long been a staple of Japanese and South Korean popular entertainment. But Deep Love, which recently appeared as a movie and a TV series, boasts an unusual feature: it began life on a mobile phone.
Facing some of the longest railway commutes in the world, Tokyo residents used to find diversion in fat books and newspapers. Increasingly, however, commuters can be found squinting into the glowing screens of their mobile phones, or keitai.
Literally meaning 'something you carry with you', the keitai has become Japan's most ubiquitous accessory. In February, the number of mobile phone subscribers in the country exceeded 100 million, which means that, apart from small children, octogenarians and Luddites, most of its 128 million people own at least one.
Standard phone features include internet browsers and digital cameras. With bigger screens and faster downloads, haiku, manga and now graphic novels are viable.
Shinchosha was among the first major publishers to spot the potential of electronic books. In 2002, it launched its Cell Phone Pocket Edition, offering unlimited access for 210 yen (HK$13) a month. The service was initially conceived as a sort of arty electronic literary magazine, but young popular writers began contributing short stories instead and the service gradually built up 30,000, mostly female subscribers.