Tsugumi Ohba's ​Death Note

Reviewed by Anson Leung

(Viz Media, 2005-2022)

Ohba’s Death Note is about a young man named Light Yagami, or his alias, Kira, who finds a mysterious notebook one day. Handsome, intelligent, physically gifted, and boasting top grades, he has it all and is soon expected to enter a top university. However, upon learning of the powers of the mysterious Death Note notebook, given to him by a Shinigami known as Ryuk, he soon develops a God complex. As “Kira”, he judges all those who are criminals. By writing their name into the notebook, he is able to kill them just by thinking of their face. He sets out on this crusade in order to send a message. The message to all potential criminals is that Kira is watching them, and they should stay in line. Kira is more than willing to kill good people if they stand in his way.

Killing the criminals is easy. Victims, using the internet to post the evil criminals’ pictures, hand Kira the means to execute them safely from his home. With his identity hidden, he is safe from prosecution. The hard part is getting away from law enforcement officers who want to catch him and arrest him for using the notebook for killing people (regardless of whether these people are evil or not). The majority of this manga has him engaging in a battle of wits with a world-famous detective known as “L” and the police force he works with, while he continues to kill from the shadows and remakes the world in his image: a utopia free of crime. “L” wins if he can prove to the world that Light is Kira, and arrest him. Light/ Kira wins if he can figure out “L”’s real name and kill him by writing it down in the notebook, leaving him more or less unopposed by a world afraid to fight him and his supernatural ability to kill people.

​The characters in this manga are diverse. Light/ Kira is intelligent but also conceited. He thinks of himself as a God because he has power, and it has corrupted him. His ego is also considerable, because he has never lost before. But it will be revealed just how fragile it is near the end of the series. Misa is a loyal, beautiful follower of Light, who follows his orders as Kira because of a marital love towards Light. By contrast, Takada, another girl Light has led on as a “girlfriend”, is a fanatic, not for Light himself, but for Kira’s ideology. They serve as rivals and foils to each other. Light’s father is a lead detective who works with “L” and is desperately trying to deny that his son is Kira, even as mounting evidence shows itself. Matsuda is an earnest and hardworking man, but also a naïve rookie the police force looks down on. However, as people become more and more afraid to fight Kira, he still stands and fights. He is sympathetic towards Kira’s ideologies that evil should be punished, but opposed to his methods of killing anybody with his notebook, even hardened criminals. Irrespective of his own personal views of Kira’s “justice”, he still does his job as a police officer first and foremost. He remains loyal and steadfast to the force, even as death is always a possibility, and his hidden talent of being a great shooter comes in handy near the end of the story. “L” is a world-class detective with quirks such as eating junk food often, even in meetings with policemen, and sitting on a couch with his bare feet touching it. Near is a child genius version of him, who ends up working with Mello, a mafia-affiliated ally, in order to take down Kira. Both Near and Mello are, working together, equal to “L”. This serves as a way to have “L” do a rematch with Kira, even after the original “L” is unfairly killed off. Teru Mikami is a prosecutor who always wanted justice as a boy and was willing to stand up to bullies despite nobody helping him, and despite being subjected to their bullying alongside the original victims because nobody helped him. He views Kira as a God and is rewarded when Kira gives him one of his Death Note notebooks to use. There are 3 at this point in the story, instead of the original one that the manga started with. He becomes his most loyal follower and does killing/ judgement on Kira’s behalf when he needs to stay low to avoid detection by Near and the police force.
 
While a lot of people like Death Note, to the point where it has garnered a live action adaptation on Netflix, it fell flat for this reviewer. A main selling point of Death Note is that it is a cerebral battle between two geniuses, “L” and Light/ Kira. However, the dialogue (both in their deductive monologues with their respective team and even towards each other) that took place during this ongoing battle was so long at every corner that it felt tedious to go over all the analysis. It isn’t merely complex; it feels needlessly convoluted. How one character beats the other is through imperfect information and having advantages the other doesn’t, and/ or doesn’t know about. Rarely do the 2 sides share the same information, making the intellectual battle feel inauthentic. Leading up to, spoiler alert, “L” being killed by Kira, and concluding Part 1 of the series, it sets up quite a grabbing intellectual ploy made by Light. This ploy serves to live up to the hype surrounding this manga, because it involves a complex but very rational notebook-switching scheme, and him wiping out his own memory. He then relies on someone else to gain special Shinigami Eyes that can get the name of “L” on his behalf, while thinking of a way for them to avoid “L” and his men detecting him. This is all made to be barely relevant, as it is basically supernatural intervention resulting in “L” being killed. Up until then, the author made us think Light was going to get “L” to somehow reveal his name to kill him with the notebook. Instead, another Shinigami is what kills “L”. Quite anti-climactic, and it renders the buildup chapters preceding it almost pointless.   
 
This book has a mix of good and negative traits. The logical arguments as both sides (Kira and “L”) try to outdo the other sound sophisticated, but upon further dissection, it’s not terribly impressive. One can come up with alternatives to disrupt this so-called “complex and iron-clad thinking” between those two geniuses. Some words are even redundant and serve to pad out the manga and make both Kira and “L” sound a bit smarter. The art style is not bad from a technical standpoint, but it is quite black and dreary.
 
Death Note does have respectable philosophical arguments about whether Kira is evil or good. At times, the monologues both “L” and Kira do with the group of people they work with, or towards themselves, contain impressive deduction skills. On the other hand, half of this information can be skipped over without the story being affected too much. The comedy did not incite much laughter, but any actual confrontations between “L” and Kira were of good quality, in both action and comedy. Character development is almost non-existent, though this type of manga doesn’t need too much of it. This manga is a mixed bag in a lot of ways, but it is not a bad manga per se.  
 
One of my favorite scenes is the ending. Light reveals himself as Kira when he thinks he’s killed all of Near’s men by having Teru Mikami enter their names into a Death Note notebook. The men survive because Near’s men made a fake notebook, and that is the one that Teru has been using for the past few minutes. Before Teru came to the warehouse confrontation, which was a standoff between Light and Near’s men, as well as the police force, Near managed to swap Teru’s notebook, a real Death Note notebook, with a fake. He stole it ahead of time and recreated a forgery in a single night before Teru could suspect it was stolen. Upon realizing this, Light realizes he has lost, because he confessed his actions and has no way of killing Near and the police force. In desperation, he uses a piece of ripped-off paper from a Death Note notebook that he stashed in his watch, and begins writing down Near’s name. Then, Matsuda has his shining moment. Before Light is one letter away from killing Near, Matsuda shoots the pen out of his hand. When Light tries to write Near’s name in his own blood, Matsuda shoots Light again to stop him. Light, realizing he’s been beaten, breaks down into insanity and begs all of his fallen allies to try to help him. These allies are either dead or unable to help him at the moment. This scene does 2 things. First, it shows the emergence of the hard worker who everyone took as a fool to be the hero of the story. Secondly, it shows the fragile ego Kira had, and how his all-knowing perspective was perhaps not so all-knowing after all, despite his considerable intelligence. Light was wrong. He was not a God, as was stated in Light’s monologue before he was killed. In the end, as stated by Near, he was nothing more than a mass murderer.
 
Death Note focuses on having amazing intellectual battles between Light/ Kira and “L” as its main selling point. But this reviewer found the dialogue associated with their battle to be needlessly convoluted and boring, as the actual actions and confrontations between “L”’s team and Kira’s team often had forces outside of their control. With this said, its characters are fine, the actual confrontations are passable, and Death Note is still a worthy read for anybody who wants a mental back and forth battle, since there are moments when it is gripping and worth reading. Overall, Death Note is not a bad manga. 

---

​Anson Leung is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Commerce program. He is an Alberta-based writer who loves all forms of writing, including poetry and article writing. In his spare time, he loves playing tennis and board games.