Midnight Cinderella: Amoral Shōjo (Girl) and Japanese Girl Culture

Japanese girls’ comics have become prominent as a subject of study in popular culture in English and Japanese. This article focuses on a new horror-thriller subgenre, with Mihoko Koiwa’s Midnight Cinderella (1982) as an example; it enacts a nuanced portrayal of heroines – which this article terms “the amoral shōjo”– who practice violence, extortion, and murder.

It argues that the largely underexplored “amoral shōjo” genre provides an example of female agency which challenges a hegemonic definition of shōjo in the cultural imagination, revealing instead a complex, powerful ideal of girlish identity in Japanese culture, forging a new modern female identity.