I won’t speak to the subject matter of Demon Wife Diaries – domineering wife, put-upon husband — but this Wall Street Journal article about the multimedia franchise spawned by a man’s blog about his, well, demon wife is fascinating.
It’s part of a trend in Japan, where blogs and chat rooms are providing inspiration, or even direct content, for comics, books and TV shows. Oh, it’s not exactly “new”; there have been other books based on blogs — some 300 in Japan since 2004, according to the article. But few reach the levels of Demon Wife Diaries, or Train Man, which has sold more than 1 million copies since its release in 2004, and been adapted for film and comics.
The article provides another interesting statistic: “Japan produced 8.7 million blogs at the end of March, and the U.S. an estimated 12 million blogs — making blogging far more popular in Japan, taking the countries’ relative populations into account. An estimated 25 million Japanese — more than a fifth of the population — are believed to read blogs.”
