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  • Death Note:The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You
  • Susan Napier (bio)
Tsugumi Ōba and Takeshi Obata. Death Note. Translated by Pookie Rolf, Alexis Kirsch, and Tetsuchiro Miyaki. San Francisco: VIZ Media. Volumes 1–12, 2005–2007. ISBNs for Volumes 1–12: 978-1-4215-0168-0; 978-1-4215-0169-7; 978-1-4215-0170-3; 978-1-4215-0031-8; 978-1-4215-0626-5; 978-1-4215-0627-2; 978-1-4215-0628-9; 978-1-4215-0629-6; 978-1-4215-0630-2; 978-1-4215-1155-9; 978-1-4215-1178-8; 978-1-4215-1327-0. Original Japanese publication, 2003–2006.

I spent two weeks in August, 2008 immersed in Death Note, Tsugumi Ōba and Takeshi Obata's extremely popular manga, anime, and live television series that has struck chords throughout Asia and the West. I came away impressed by the work but also strangely nostalgic for the DC comics that I wasted large parts of my youth reading. As some readers may remember, one of the key parts of Superman's "code" was not to kill. This led to many convoluted situations where Superman had to figure out how to capture the bad guy without mortally wounding him (usually it was a "him"), and even to the occasional bait-and-switch story in which it seemed that Superman had (gasp!) violated his code. Of course it all turned out right in the end. I'm not sure if all the other DC super-heroes had the same code. In the recent Batman film, The Dark Knight (2008), one of the villains points out Batman's major weakness: Batman has rules. Unlike the Joker, whose major fearsomeness lies in having no rules, it seems clear from the movie that one of Batman's "rules" is to avoid killing at all costs.

Let us contrast this with Death Note, which in fact has lots of rules, but it also has lots of death. But not just death—the work revolves around killings, almost always premeditated, to the point that it seems that virtually every other page of every one of the twelve-volume series contains a murder. The favorite method of killing is by causing a heart attack, and there are innumerable scenes of people clutching their chests and falling to the ground, but there are also plenty of fiery conflagrations, gunshots, traffic "accidents," and even faked suicides. Thugs are killed. Politicians are killed. Decent honorable men are killed. Beautiful young women are killed. Bullies are killed. Even "heroes" are killed. To be fair, the death agonies are usually not lengthily depicted—after all, a heart attack is a relatively quiet way of dying—but the overall effect of the series is that of a symphony or a tapestry of intentional deaths, woven into a genuinely intriguing, morally provocative, and extremely entertaining quest/mystery narrative.

The premise of Death Note is both simple and provocative: floating above the human world is the world of the shinigami, gods of death who cause human beings to die by writing their names in notebooks. Occasionally, either by accident or malice, a shinigami drops his or her notebook in our world and an innocent human picks it up. In Death Note, brilliant and handsome young high school student Yagami Light picks up a notebook dropped by a shinigami, who has fortunately written the rules of the Death Note on the cover. The most important rule is the most simple—if you write down the name of a person whose face you know, that person will die of a heart attack within forty seconds. Light later discovers many permutations—the most significant is that he can specify both the time and the manner of a person's death. Then [End Page 356] Ryuk, Light's guardian shinigami, explains that should Light wish to give up half his life span, he can obtain "shinigami eyes," which let him learn someone's name just by looking at them.

With very little hesitation, Light decides to try out the notebook, first on a criminal who has made the news by holding children hostage, and then on a bully who threatens a...

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