ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the examples of intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translations in and of Death Note to draw attention to some of the issues linked to the translation of multi-lingual texts found in more than one medium. In the process, the overlapping of cultural and technological locations unsettles any notion of Japan proper in recognition that there are multiple versions of Japan that can be accessed and imagined from a number of different linguistic, cultural and technological locations. Death note iterates the longstanding ethical question of who has the right to kill while exploring the tensions between the secular and the supernatural. Roman Jakobson's notion of intersemiotic translation as well as McLuhan's ideas of media and translation, have been thickened and extended because what is at stake is not the translation of just a text but social concepts as well the right to kill, to be sure, but also the choices that we make and their consequences.
