The history of teenage witches is tied to the uncanniness surrounding adolescence. Signifying metamorphosis, uncertainty, and an uncomfortable liminality, the teenage years are a period of intense biological and psychological tumult. Neither adult nor child, straining for independence yet perpetually fettered by the prohibitions of parental authority, teens exist in an ambiguous, in-between state. Adolescence is demarcated by a continuous struggle wherein attempts to mould an independent, authentic adult selfhood are invariably hampered as one is repeatedly drawn back to the dependent state of the child through the omnipresence of familial demands and constraints. At the same time, there is something frightening and unsettling about adolescence. After all, adolescence is perhaps the time when one feels most acutely, and most intimately, the horror of abjection.

Viz Media licensed the novel for an English-language release in North America in A live-action film adaptation of the novel directed by Tetsuya Nakashima premiered in Japan in May Viz Media screened the film in select theaters in the United States in late under the title Kamikaze Girls. A manga series based on the novel was illustrated by Yukio Kanesada and serialized in Shogakukan 's Betsucomi magazine in

Crystal's parents were away on vacation when she made a disturbing discovery on her father's computer: nude pictures — and she was the subject. Crystal says her father, Ron, who had adopted her when she was a young girl, retrieved the pictures via a computer Web camera in her bedroom, which had previously been in his office. The photos stretched back five years, to when she was She made the discovery while her parents were on vacation.

Rusul woke to find herself alone. Her new husband had gone. The marriage had lasted just three hours. It wasn't the teenager's first marriage. It wasn't even her second, third or fourth.