Death Note #1-8

Death Note #1-8

Originally released in 2003

Written by Tsugumi Ohba

Art by Takeshi Obata

I was considering reading a few chapters of Bleach (which I'd read before) or Demon Slayer (which I haven't read), but I wasn't really in the mood for an action-focused manga today - I wanted something different.  If there's one word that describes Death Note in comparison to the regular series in Shonen Jump, it's "different".

Most Shonen Jump series tend to be action-focused, especially since Dragon Ball helped to popularize the concept.  There are comedy series and sports manga as well, but Death Note is quite unusual by Jump's standards - it's a detective story where the main protagonist uses the notebook from a god of death to kill criminals.  I had originally read this in the early to mid 2000s, but I wanted to see how well it held up. (plus, a lot of my original read-through of the series used fan translations, and the official translations might be clearer in some aspects)

Light Yagami is a brilliant but bored high school student - top of his class, popular, and having a bright future ahead of him.  Ryuk, a god of death who's grown tired of how dull the world of the Shinigami (or Death Gods) is, drops his Death Note in the human world to see what will happen.  Thinking it's a prank at first, Light tests the book on a man who's holding a kindergarten class hostage, only to discover that it's the real deal.

Within less than a week, Light goes from hesitantly trying it out to writing dozens of names in it and believing he can use it to turn the world into a crime-free utopia that he rules over as a god in the shadows.  A lot of the suspense from the series comes from Light testing the boundaries and rules of the Death Note as he tries to evade the police, Interpol, and the mysterious anonymous detective known only as L.

L is a Sherlock Holmes-like detective - brilliant but quirky, and he only takes cases that catch his interest.  When criminals all over the world start to die of heart attacks, it becomes clear that this is not ordinary and he takes the job. (the Death Note can kill people through other means, as long as they're physically possible, but Light uses heart attacks as his calling card and saves more dramatic or specific deaths for special occasions)

Light's fatal flaw rears its head early on - fitting someone who started calling himself "the god of the new world" in less than a week, he's extremely arrogant, and all it takes is an L stand-in appearing on TV and calling the killer (who the internet dubbed "Kira") evil for Light to lose his cool and immediately kill the supposed detective.  This action reveals a few things to the real L - that Kira can kill someone while only knowing their name or face, and because of where the broadcast was shown, L now knows that Kira lives somewhere in the Kanto area of Japan.

Light can also be reckless at times - he intentionally makes it seem like he's a school-age student who is connected to the police (which he is, since his father is part of the investigation), only to change things up and start executing criminals hourly.  His actions cause L to suspect the police, however - Light plans to use this to put a wedge between L and the police, as L uses the FBI to investigate Japan's police force and their relatives, but it causes L's list of possible suspects to shrink dramatically.

Following Light at all times is Ryuk, who has to stick around as long as Light has his Death Note. (he's only visible to people who have touched the Death Note in Light's possession)  Despite being a god of death, Ryuk is something of an audience stand-in, weirdly enough.  Like the reader, he's here for entertainment - he quickly becomes engrossed in the battle of wits between Light and L, finding humans to be amusing.  He doesn't specifically take sides, only mentioning details if they would prevent him from being inconvenienced or annoyed.

Much like Ryuk, I find the early parts of this series to be really engaging.  It's a well-written cat-and-mouse game between Light and L where I'm not concerned with who wins as long as it keeps going.  Despite "exactly as planned" basically being Light's catch-phrase at several key moments in the series, and him taking an absurd amount of precautions, he's not perfect - my problem with how some manga series portray geniuses is that there are times where they somehow plan for events that they had no possible way of foreseeing (especially if they're the villain of the series), but Light's precautions seems reasonable, and we see the after-effects of his mistakes and how he scrambles to turn the situation around.

The series has monkey wrenches to throw into the plans of both L and Light (one example would be Naomi Misora, a former FBI agent who quickly figures out key details about the case, who is introduced in chapter 8), and despite it not being the sort of series that you would see in Shonen Jump (a dialogue-heavy thriller where the protagonist is the villain, or at least someone who does evil things with good intentions), it's one of the best series that I've read from that magazine.