The Asia coverage in the New Yorker is often embarrassingly bad, a lethal combination of smugness and ignorance that leads each article to conclude on a "those curious Orientals!" note.  The "Letter from Japan"  article in this week's issue (December 22, 2008) by Dana Goodyear, however, represents a step up from the norm.  

She takes on the recent boom in keitai shosetsu (cellphone novels), a new popular fiction genre consisting of stories written by, for, and about young women, circulated intially via cellphone text-messaging services but now increasingly published in conventional book form.   The most successful titles sell millions of copies, despite the general disdain in which they are held by the literary establishment.  The genre is one of the few positive developments in the otherwise grim recent history of the Japanese publishing industry.

Goodyear interviews writers, publishers, and critics, and gives a good sense of what the storylines are like.  She doesn't entirely escape the New Yorker Asia virus, though.  The article ends on the obligatory "they haven't even read the Tale of Genji" note.  Tranlsation:  those silly Orientals, we civilized Westerners have to save them from themselves.   But on the whole, the article is informative and a small step forward for a magazine that really should know better.