By MIKI TANIKAWA

TOKYO-Eiko Moori, a 24-yearold office worker, felt the pull of manga when she saw an ad on her cellphone screen. She had grown up on a steady diet of manga, a form of Japanese comic, so the chance to reread “Mischievous Kiss” was irresistible.

She took the plunge: for 1,600 yen, or about $17, she bought the entire series, more than 70 installments.

“It brought back memories,” Ms. Moori said, adding that she had once owned the whole series. “I sold all of them because they were crowding the space. But for just a few clicks on my mobile, I was able to read them all again.”

In the year ended in March, manga publishers in Japan made 32.9 billion yen ($347.7 million) from mobile manga, up 43 percent from the previous year and from next to nothing in 2003, when manga first became available by cellphone, according to Impress R&D, a research firm in Tokyo.

“At present, cellphone comics is the only one roaring ahead in sales,” said Shinichi Yoshizawa, director of digital media business development at Kodansha, the largest Japanese publisher of books, manga and magazines.

Revenue in magazine and book form has fallen for more than a decade , according to the Research Institute for Publication in Tokyo.

While it is unclear whether the mobile sales will make up for revenue lost elsewhere, consumers are taking to the mobile version. “On a whim, I can decide to read them on the train,” Ms. Moori said. Others cited the graphics, saying manga looks especially good lit up against the dark screen of a cellphone.

Women like Ms. Moori have been crucial to manga’s mobile success. “The most popular comics on the mobile are adult-oriented ones for women,” including love stories with sexually explicit content, Yusuke Nakabayashi, a media consultant at Nomura Research Institute, a unit of Nomura Securities, said. Mobile viewing accords women privacy in ways that magazines and books do not.

In fact, about 70 percent of cellphone readers are women, said Yutaka Tashiro, director of the rights group at Shueisha, another publisher.

The romanceand sex- f i l led manga-known as shojo manga-are particularly popular among women in their 20s, Mr. Tashiro said.

Manga’s mainstay readership-men-have stayed mostly with the paper version. One reason: on the small screen, some of the artists’ intent is lost.

“Manga strips are placed in sequence on the pages, creating a special visual effect,” said Noboru Rokuda, a professor at Kyoto Seika University, which has a manga faculty, and a longtime artist. “It is one rare medium that allows readers to have a bird’s-eye view on several strips and flow back and forth in time. That’s lost when each strip is displayed on the screen one by one.”

But no matter who is watching, manga specialists agreed that the future lies with mobile viewers.

“The idea of printing the magazine, loading them on the track and delivering them to distribution centers, that whole model is on the decline,” Mr. Rokuda said.


BIRDSTUDIO/SHUEISHA INC.