Train

The greatest piece of romance literature ever written by a few dozen people on a chatroom: the chatlogs of Densha Otoko

A 22-year-old Japanese man mustered up the courage to save a woman from the harrassment of a drunken old geezer on a train. She asked for his name and contact information, and he stayed only long enough to give them (after the police questioning that is). She sent him a pair of Hermes teacups to thank him. After thinking over it for one night, he finally took a chance and called her to ask her out for dinner. She hesitated. All seemed lost for the guy when suddenly the girl suggested a Dutch treat instead because she felt bad making the guy treat her for her thank-you gift. It was the guy’s first time asking a girl out and it went on from there. The pair eventually got married.

A fairly standard television love story… but the catch is that it’s real and it took place from around March to May of 2004. The novel is entirely composed of real 2ch chatlogs, even the ASCII art, the slangs and the typos. The guy was a frequent visitor of both Akihabara and 2ch and he made daily posts to 2ch during the course of these events. He received congratulations and advices from fellow posters after every success, from the first time he met the girl on the train to the end of it all. Because of the nature of their first meeting, the guy became known as the “Densha Otoko” (“Train Man”) on 2ch and the girl as “Hermes” (from the teacups).

(And just in case you didn’t already know: 2ch or 2ちゃんねる is the largest internet forum in the world. Read more on wikipedia)

And another interesting twist: because he once mentioned in a posting when asked what the girl looked like that she resembled an actress from a TV commercial, that actress (Miki Nakatani) later played the role of Hermes in the TV series based on the story. The movie adaptation is currently topping the Japanese box office sales.

If you understand Japanese, you can read what is basically the whole novel from the link up there, as the so-called “novel” is just a printed chatlog. It’s a really interesting read, not just for the content or the humour (it’s 2ch after all), but also linguistically speaking (it’s 2ch after all). The same qualities also make it impossible for a commerical English translation though…