The fascinating, mind-blowing, and thought-provoking
plot of Death Note 1 by Tsugumi Ohba
(VIZ Media 2003, paperback, 200 pages with black-and-white art by Takeshi Obata)
is centered on Light aka Kira, a seventeen-year-old Japanese student who is one
of the top high school students in the world. He finds the Death Note, a notebook of the Shinigami (Japanese
gods of death), deliberately left on earth by rogue Shinigami Ryuk.
The Note comes with instructions explaining how to use
it: write down a person’s name,
picture that person in one’s mind, write down that person’s manner and time of
death, and the death will happen as written. If one does not specify the details of the death (I simplify here), the person
will die of a heart attack in six minutes.
Kira uses the Note to kill evil people in massive
numbers mysteriously and from afar. He reasons correctly that this will provide
a strong incentive for criminals to curtail their bad behavior. As Kira anticipates, a utopian society
begins to emerge where the truly evil will all be dead and the potentially evil
too scared to act. Kira, the god-like possessor of the Note, is pleased to be
secretly in control of this new, peaceful, safe, and law-abiding society.
This had me thinking: What if I found such a magical item when I was
seventeen? I would like to think
that I would do what Kira decided to do, do nothing at all, or destroy the book. However, to put it mildly, I was not awfully
popular in high school. I know
what I probably would have done....
Fortunately for the fictional world of Death Note, an idealistic if
Machiavellian teenaged intellectual finds the Note and uses it as a righteous
angel might. The police are
simultaneously happy about the drop in crime and appalled by the circumstances. The lawmen turn to the mysterious
world-renowned detective known only as “L” to find and stop Kira.
The world’s greatest detective pitted against one of
the world’s smartest teenagers possessed of god-like power--what a
match-up! Mystery lovers such as I
will really enjoy the L vs. Kira plot, as it makes for an interesting game of
cat and mouse; and it is never clear who is the cat and who the mouse. Kira is willing to kill L for standing
in his way--the only thing stopping him is that he does not know L’s true name
or what he looks like.
L believes he is righteous and that Kira is evil. Kira believes he, Kira, is righteous
and that L, while well intentioned, must be eliminated to ensure the coming of
utopia. As for who is truly
righteous and who evil, the reader must decide. I am not sure. Death Note 1 is available from Shonen Jump
https://www.viz.com/read/manga/death-note-vol-1/5360 for $9.99.
