ABSTRACT
Kaori Yuki’s short manga “Kaine: Endorphins—Between Life and Death” is an example of horror in shōjo manga (adolescent girls’ comics). A murder mystery centered around the untimely death of a troubled rock star, “Kaine” uses its haunted media, CDs that are rumored to induce suicide in its teen listeners, as a point of departure to examine the many tensions within the story between the human and the technological. By subverting the cultural associations with haunted media, through showing human programming to be at the heart of the supposedly supernatural CDs, “Kaine” reveals its deeply anxious preoccupation with media technology’s potential to destabilize human agency and thus challenge the anthropocentric perspective. This tension between the human and technology then becomes a point of departure to examine the crux of the narrative’s conflict: pervasive anxiety about the disruptive relationship of recording technology to the human experience of temporality and mortality.
