What Is The World of Despair (Zetsubō no Sekai)? | The Cult Japanese Internet Novel Written as a Personal Homepage Diary

日本語で読む

The World of Despair (Zetsubō no sekai) is known as a work by Miyatani Shunji, and among early Japanese internet fiction it is one of the works whose name has survived long after the author’s own website disappeared. In April 2025 the Japanese games and culture site Denfaminicogamer covered it as a “legendary internet novel,” reporting that the OJIJI.net-based mirror, long one of the main ways to read it, might soon become inaccessible[1]. It was not a passing curiosity of the 2000s: more than twenty years on, it is still being discussed as part of the memory of internet culture.

In the contemporaneous sources that can be verified, by December 19, 2003 at the latest, an author site under the name Miyatani was hosting The World of Despair along with several related series[2]. In 2005 a third-party mirror on a different host can be confirmed[3], and a personal blog from the same year mentions the name Miyatani and the closure of the site[4]. In 2008 a question page on Hatena refers to the work and to the literature board of 2channel[5], and in the same year a copycat edition, described as a third party’s “remake for mobile phones,” can also be confirmed[6]. The author site, the mirrors, and the remake are separate lines with different provenances, and they cannot be treated as one and the same “original edition.”

The exact date publication began is not known. A third-party blog from 2005 says the work “apparently” started around November 1999[4], but this is not a date established by contemporaneous primary sources. In the story, the narrator “I” (boku) starts writing his homepage diary on November 8, but that is a date inside the fiction and says nothing about publication. What can be said firmly at present is only that an author site under the name Miyatani existed by December 2003.

The work begins when a high-school student, “I,” starts writing a diary on his personal homepage. The later preserved edition on the copycat side, which is the one that can be read today, consists of 33 units—a prologue plus Weeks 1 through 32—arranged in eight chapters. The first half depicts bullying at school, family, violence, and revenge, but partway through, message boards, chat, email, ICQ, anonymous handles, and multiple personal websites enter the story, and it gradually develops into a question of “Who is really on the other side of the screen?” and “Who is the ‘I’ writing this diary?”

The work is hard to classify, but for convenience it can be described as a mix of diary novel, psychological horror, internet suspense, underground/cult internet literature, and a form one is tempted to call “net mockumentary.” “Net mockumentary” is not an established genre name; it is a working label used in this article for a form that makes the reader feel as if they are peering, through records such as diaries, message boards, chats, emails, and personal homepages, into the private life of a real person or the traces of a real incident.

For the lineage of early internet literature that includes this work, see Viscera’s “Japanese Internet Underground Literature”; for the broader framework of “underground literature,” see also “What Is Underground Literature?”.

Note: The following discusses violence, sexual violence, self-harm, and related content. The latter half also contains major spoilers.

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What kind of work is The World of Despair?

A defining feature of The World of Despair is that the internet is more than just a setting. Posts stay on a message board, but chat leaves nothing behind. A handle does not necessarily correspond to a real person. One person can use several names. Being linked from another site can expose a closed circle of relationships to the outside. These conditions peculiar to the Web are increasingly used, as the story goes on, as the mechanisms that drive the plot.

Alongside the diary of “I,” the work features a number of websites: his younger sister Saki’s “World of Hope” (Kibō no sekai), the similar-sounding “World of Ruin” (Metsubō no sekai), NSC, which observes people online, and NSCS, built in imitation of NSC. The characters read other people’s sites, save records, pose as someone else, place links, and copy sites. And by the end, even the act of reading a diary comes to bear on the memory and self-understanding of “I.”

The content is also quite extreme. It depicts bullying, violence, sexual violence, murder, self-harm, stalking, and the exposure of personal information. But to think of The World of Despair simply as “a scary story from the old internet” or “a lurid piece of weird writing” is to miss much of what characterizes it. When we extracted and measured the text of the later preserved edition for this research, the portion of the main story subject to our reading came to about 98,722 Japanese characters. This is not a figure claimed by the distributing site but a measurement made in the course of researching this article. For the preservation archive, see [8].

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The diary of a bullied “I”

The story begins on November 8, when “I” opens a homepage and starts writing a diary[9]. From the next day, the record of his school life begins, and bullying centered on a student named Okuda gradually intensifies. “I” is called not by his real name but “Bug,” and is subjected to harassment at his desk, violence, and demands for money. Araki, who objects to the bullying, is himself targeted for a time, but then goes over to the side of the bullies[10].

That said, The World of Despair is not a story in which an innocent victim is hurt one-sidedly by villains. “I” also hurts others. He uses images left on a digital camera by Okuda to take revenge on Araki, and his twisted fixation on his younger sister Saki grows stronger. Those who have been hurt hurt someone else, and those people are victims themselves in other situations. The positions of victim and perpetrator are never fixed.

Okuda eventually dies at a train station. A black scarf and gaps in memory appear in the diary, and Araki’s involvement is explained later, but most of the circumstances of the incident reach us through the records and explanations of “I”[11]. Already at this stage, a gap opens between what is written in the diary and the events the reader can establish.

In Chapter 2, the fixation of “I” on his sister Saki grows even stronger, and after an incident on New Year’s Day Saki is hospitalized. In Chapter 3, “I” returns to school and takes revenge on Araki; the former victim becomes a perpetrator. Up to this point the work already stands as a grim psychological horror, but it is only after this that The World of Despair begins to reveal the structure that makes it distinctive as an internet novel.

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Into the “World of Hope”

In Chapter 4, “I” finds on Saki’s computer a homepage she had been running called “World of Hope.” It contains “My Diary,” a message board, an entrance to a chat room, and saved email records. Reading them, “I” learns that Saki was active under the name sakky and had been in contact with someone called “Tōru.” Following the saved information further, he comes to identify Tōru as Okuda Tōru[12].

What matters here is that different media leave different information behind. A message board keeps past posts. Chat has no logs of past conversations. Emails are stored on a personal computer. A handle alone does not reveal the real person, but by combining names and addresses left in different places, one can close in on an anonymous counterpart. The difference between what is recorded and what is lost is used to drive the mystery-solving in the plot.

Then, in Chapter 5, “I” returns to “World of Hope” using Saki’s handle sakky. He posts on the message board, updates the diary, and interacts with online friends through ICQ and chat[13]. From here on, the reader has to think separately about the name displayed on the screen and the person using that name.

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When names and people don’t match

In the second half, a large number of handles appear: sakky, Takeshi, Miki, Nagisa, the Executioner, the Informer, Ohmu, Keyser Söze, Rollo Tomasi, Endōmame, TOMO, Datura, and others. Moreover, each of them does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with a single person.

“I” himself uses multiple handles, and there are scenes in which he plays several participants to make a message board look busy[14]. Conversely, several names thought to belong to different people are later linked to the same person. The story even suggests the possibility that the same name was used by different people.

The characters try to identify the person on the other side of the screen by combining message-board posts, ICQ conversations, emails, remote hosts, and so on. The most extreme example is the storyline around a murder-request board. “I” posts a certain person’s personal information and asks for that person to be killed, and afterward a newspaper in the story reports that person’s death. Someone calling themselves “the Executioner” declares that they carried it out, but that post alone does not tell us whether the poster and the real killer are the same person. Then yet another character claims to have committed the killing[15].

A name online, words spoken online, and an act in the real world: the fact that these three do not easily line up is what sustains the suspense of the second half.

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Sites that watch sites

In the second half, even the relationships between websites become complicated. A “World of Ruin” resembling “World of Hope” appears, and it then emerges that a site called “NSC” had been watching the regulars of “World of Hope”[16]. Not only participants who post, but also readers who write nothing, read other people’s sites, and record what they say and do, enter the story.

On learning this, “I” strikes back by creating “NSCS,” modeled on NSC[17]. He manipulates access counters, posts while impersonating others, uses proxies, and spreads information through links. The acts of reading and making homepages are turned into tools of surveillance, attack, and disguise.

By this point, it is not enough to call The World of Despair simply “a novel published on the Web.” The functions of the Web are built into the story as the rules governing the characters’ actions and their information warfare.

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Who is the “I” writing the diary?

From here on, this article contains major spoilers concerning the heart of the story.

For most of the story, the “I” of the diary understands himself to be Iwamoto Ryōhei—the one called “Bug” at school, bullied by Okuda, and fixated on his younger sister Saki. But in Week 31, prompted by an exchange with Watanabe Miki, “I” begins to question his own memories and body. And when he looks in a mirror, he realizes that the body reflected there is Saki’s[18].

In the final week, an explanation is given: Ryōhei had already died, and in Saki’s body, after she read “My Diary” (Boku no nikki) left by her brother, there arose an “I” who recognizes the brother’s memories as its own[19]. The possibility is raised that the record the reader had taken to be Iwamoto Ryōhei’s first-person diary had been read and carried on by a different body.

Here the meaning of the diary is inverted. Normally, a diary is “writing that records events I have experienced.” In The World of Despair, however, reading a past diary ends up forming the “I.” The record does not merely preserve memory; it reshapes the self-understanding of the person who reads it.

As a result, even the events of the first half can no longer be settled simply. In Week 16, the diary records that Saki died and “I” survived[20], but near the end this is reversed into an explanation that Ryōhei died and Saki’s body survived. Within the work, too, not everything is resolved by independent third-party testimony, and uncertainty between record and memory remains to the very end.

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Turning the personal homepage into a novel

The World of Despair makes use of the many mechanisms that made up the Web of its time: personal homepages, diaries, message boards, chat, email, ICQ, anonymous email, remote hosts, proxies, access counters, copied sites, and more. A message board preserves what is said; chat is conversation that exists only in the moment. Handles become a means of playing someone else, and access information becomes a clue for identifying a counterpart. A copied site is used to strike back at a watcher, and in the end the diary acts on the very self-understanding of “I.”

It is because of this structure that one is tempted to call it, for convenience, a “net mockumentary.” The reader is made to read as if following diaries and logs someone left behind, guessing at the people and incidents on the other side of the screen. Rather than “a novel you can read on the internet,” The World of Despair is better characterized as a novel that tells its story through the structure of the internet.

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Where can you read it now?

The long-referenced mirror at aaaaaa.ojiji.net can be confirmed to have existed in a Wayback snapshot of November 24, 2005[3]. However, on April 19, 2025, FC2 announced that it would end its legacy free homepage spaces, including FC2WEB and OJIJI.NET, on June 30 of that year[7]. The announcement stated that the affected domains in use would become inaccessible after the shutdown, and OJIJI.NET is explicitly listed among the services being discontinued. The April 2025 Denfaminicogamer article also covered The World of Despair prompted by this announced disappearance—that the mirror would no longer be viewable[1].

Meanwhile, as of September 2026, the copycat “Mobile World of Despair” (Keitai no zetsubō no sekai) remains online. The site describes itself as “a remake for mobile phones” of “a work by Miyatani Shunji”[6]. For a first-time reader, then, this edition is relatively accessible. However, this is copycat’s own description of the author and edition, and since it is a third-party remake, we have not been able to confirm that it matches the author-site edition exactly, or that it was authorized by the original author.

For our reading of the text, we mainly used the later preserved edition derived from the former story-magic.com site, kept on the copycat side. It is structured to proceed from the prologue (in Japanese) to Week 1, Week 2, and so on, and all 33 units of the main story survive. The copycat page introducing its preservation archives also provides archives of the former site[8]. For this research, we confirmed that the story-magic_com.lzh listed there contains all 33 HTML files corresponding to the prologue plus Weeks 1–32, and decoded them as CP932.

Even for this later preserved edition, however, we have not confirmed that the files were taken directly from the 2003 author site as contemporaneous files, or that the text is identical, word for word, to that of the author site. In this article we use it as the base text for analyzing the work’s content, but we do not treat the structure or file dates of the preserved HTML as evidence of the state of the work at the time of publication or of the date publication began.

The author site of the time can itself be confirmed from a snapshot of December 19, 2003 preserved in the Internet Archive[2]. There one can see the title The World of Despair, the name Miyatani, “My Diary” (Boku no nikki), and navigation to several related series.

In its 2025 article, Denfaminicogamer reported that while the mirror carried a message announcing a book edition, “there probably does not exist” any publication in which The World of Despair could be read at that time[1]. For now, reading the preserved Web edition is more realistic than looking for a print or e-book version.

This article is not involved in the operation or distribution of the third-party preservation sites or distribution archives introduced here. The links are provided to show the current state of the work’s survival and the research path used for this article.

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Conclusion: reading an old internet oddity today

Old HTML, ICQ, personal homepages, access counters—seen from today, these technologies can look like historical artifacts. But the problems The World of Despair dealt with have not aged. Is the person on the other side of the screen really the person you imagine? How far can information left on the internet be trusted? To what extent is a persona created online the same as the real person?

Today it is not unusual for one person to use several social media accounts, or to play a different persona anonymously. On top of that, generative AI has made it easy to produce text no human directly wrote, and even statements that seem to come from people who do not exist. Reread from this environment, the act repeated throughout The World of Despair—“guessing at the human on the other side from the information shown on the screen”—has, if anything, become more familiar.

Although it strongly reflects the Web environment of more than twenty years ago, the gaps it explores—between record and memory, name and personality, information on a screen and real people—are still with us. That is what keeps The World of Despair from being merely a curiosity of the old internet.

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About the research for this article

For this article, we used the later preserved edition surviving on the copycat side as the reference for the work’s text, decoding and reading in full the 33 units from the prologue through Weeks 1 to 32. We cross-checked characters, incidents, handles, in-story websites, message boards, chats, emails, and the timeline, and distinguished between what is actually described in the work and what characters or the narrator explain.

In particular, regarding the identity of “I” at the end, whether Saki and Ryōhei are alive or dead, and who carried out the murders, we have not treated characters’ after-the-fact explanations as objective facts of the fictional world. Where discrepancies remain in the text, or where points cannot be settled by independent testimony, we have described them with their uncertainty intact.

For the publication history, we separately confirmed the 2003 author site, the 2005 third-party mirror, the 2008 remake edition, and so on through the Internet Archive and third-party sources from nearby periods. We have not equated the later preserved edition with the 2003 author site, nor have we read in-story dates as publication dates. For the state of preservation from 2025 onward, we referred to FC2’s official announcement and the Denfaminicogamer article.

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Notes

Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.

1. 電ファミニコゲーマー「伝説のネット小説『絶望の世界』掲載サイトのサービス終了が予告」 [Denfaminicogamer, “Shutdown Announced for Site Hosting the Legendary Internet Novel The World of Despair”], April 28, 2025. Consulted for the announced shutdown of the OJIJI.net-based mirror, the copycat preserved edition, the announced book edition, and related matters.
2. 宮谷作者サイト [Miyatani’s author site] — Internet Archive, snapshot of December 19, 2003. Confirms The World of Despair, several related series, “僕の日記” [My Diary], “宮谷の自己紹介” [About Miyatani], and more.
3. 『絶望の世界』第三者ミラー [Third-party mirror of The World of Despair] aaaaaa.ojiji.net — Internet Archive, snapshot of November 24, 2005. Treated as distinct from the author site and the page of first publication.
4. 「最上屋日記」 [Mogamiya Diary], November 5, 2005. Consulted for a third-party account mentioning the name Miyatani, the closure of the site, and the claim—hedged as “apparently”—that the work began around November 1999. Not used as grounds for establishing the start date of publication.
5. はてな「人力検索」 [Hatena “Human-Powered Search” Q&A], 2008. Confirms references to The World of Despair and to a thread on the literature board. Not used as grounds for the first publication of the original or for the identity of the author.
6. 「携帯の絶望の世界」 [Mobile World of Despair] — Internet Archive, snapshot of January 5, 2008 / current copycat edition. The copycat side describes it as “a remake for mobile phones” of “a work by Miyatani Shunji.” Full identity with the original edition and authorization by the original author are unconfirmed.
7. FC2総合インフォメーション「FC2旧無料ホームページスペースのサービス終了について」 [FC2 General Information, “On the End of Service for FC2’s Legacy Free Homepage Spaces”], April 19, 2025. Lists FC2WEB, OJIJI.NET, and others as being discontinued, with service ending on June 30, 2025.
8. copycat 保存アーカイブ案内 [copycat preservation archive page]. For this article, we checked the 33 HTML files of the main story contained in the story-magic_com.lzh listed there. The figure of about 98,722 characters is not a value stated on the distribution page but our own measurement of the text subject to reading in this research.
9. copycat後年保存版『絶望の世界』序章 [copycat later preserved edition of The World of Despair, Prologue] index.html. Confirms the opening of the homepage and the start of the diary.
10. 第1週 [Week 1] z1.html. Consulted for school life and the beginning of the bullying.
11. 第4週 [Week 4] z4.html / 第12週 [Week 12] z12.html. Consulted for Okuda’s death and the explanation presented afterward.
12. 第14週 [Week 14] z14.html / 第15週 [Week 15] z15.html. Consulted for “World of Hope,” Saki’s online activities, and the records concerning Tōru.
13. 第17週 [Week 17] z17.html / 第18週 [Week 18] z18.html. Consulted for the use of the name sakky, ICQ, chat, and related matters.
14. 第23週 [Week 23] z23.html. Consulted for the use of multiple handles and fictitious participants.
15. 第20週 [Week 20] z20.html / 第27週 [Week 27] z27.html. Consulted for the murder-request board, “the Executioner,” and the multiple explanations of the killing.
16. 第25週 [Week 25] z25.html. Consulted for “World of Ruin,” NSC, and related matters.
17. 第26週 [Week 26] z26.html. Consulted for NSCS, the imitation of sites, the counterattack against surveillance, and related matters.
18. 第31週 [Week 31] z31.html. Consulted for the late developments in which the body and self-understanding of “I” are shaken.
19. 第32週 [Week 32] z32.html. Consulted for the final explanation presented in the work concerning Ryōhei, Saki, “My Diary,” and how “I” came into being.
20. 第16週 [Week 16] z16.html. Consulted for the account of Saki’s death presented within the diary at that point.

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References and main sources

Author site, publication history, and reception

• 宮谷作者サイト [Miyatani’s author site] — Internet Archive, snapshot of December 19, 2003
• 『絶望の世界』第三者ミラー [Third-party mirror of The World of Despair] — Internet Archive, snapshot of November 24, 2005
• 「最上屋日記」 [Mogamiya Diary], November 5, 2005
• 電ファミニコゲーマー「伝説のネット小説『絶望の世界』掲載サイトのサービス終了が予告」 [Denfaminicogamer, “Shutdown Announced for Site Hosting the Legendary Internet Novel The World of Despair”]
• FC2総合インフォメーション「FC2旧無料ホームページスペースのサービス終了について」 [FC2 General Information, “On the End of Service for FC2’s Legacy Free Homepage Spaces”]

Later preserved editions and text

• copycat「携帯の絶望の世界」 [copycat, Mobile World of Despair]
• copycat後年保存版『絶望の世界』序章 [copycat later preserved edition of The World of Despair, Prologue]
• copycat 保存アーカイブ案内 [copycat preservation archive page]

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Translated from the Japanese original, “『絶望の世界』とは？｜ 個人ホームページの形式を小説にしたネット・カルト作品”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.

*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.