Chances are, you watch Japanese anime. Chances are, you were a fan of Pokemon a decade back. Chances are, you find Japanese animation style somewhat kitsch at times. Whatever the chances, Death Note is an anime worthy of being eulogized, having its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and being discussed and dissected for decades. It is intense, it is gripping and the overall mixture of animation, dialogue and music is exceedingly well done. But over and above everything, it makes you think about various issues of morality, righteousness and character in human beings (and perhaps supernatural beings as well). In this article, I’ll examine some of its themes.
Quick facts: Death Note was originally published as a Japanese manga in 2003 and then aired as a 37-episode series in 2006-07. This article deals with the anime series, as shown in its English dub. The story starts when Light Yagami, a high school student with a brilliant mind, finds a notebook lying around. This is a Death Note, with the property that whoever’s name is written on it will die. Light’s original plan is to use the notebook to kill all criminals and create a ‘new world’ of which he is the god, but things start to become interesting when L, an eccentric genius of a sleuth, decides to track down the owner of the Death Note and stop him from killing.
Note: This article is intended for those who have watched the series. There are spoilers to follow, so don’t read if you’re intending to watch. The episodes are 22 minutes long on average and most of them are available on YouTube.
Creation of a New World
Light’s primary purpose for the Death Note is to create a world free from criminals and wrongdoers. This is what he does in the first few episodes and later what Mikami attempts to do overzealously. It’s quite obvious that Mikami is a fanatic. He wanted to kill his own mother because she told her son that things won’t always happen the way he wants. What exactly did Mikami want? He wanted an end to murder, rape, theft, assault and everything else that keeps the police busy. To achieve this, he wanted to kill all the bad guys responsible for these acts. Is this a bad thing to want? Let’s ignore the fact that Mikami also wanted to kill bullies in his school and people who might have been simply ogling the breasts of a female standing next to them in bus. Let’s just focus on the fact that Mikami and Light both wanted to end the lives of criminals. Or, as Mikami puts it fittingly, delete them. Delete them from the face of the globe by ending their lives. This is wrong, isn’t it? After all, who is someone like Light to take law into his own hands? That’s what you would ordinarily think. But, let’s say you are a female who is walking alone along a dark alley when you are surrounded by a couple of goons and forced to do stuff against your will. Let’s make this clear. Let’s say you are coerced into having sex with them, after which they leave you bleeding and half-dead. Now let’s say you also know that these goons will be later found out, captured and punished. Will the knowledge of this fact save you at that instant of time or lessen the impact this encounter will have on your mind? Will this fact in any way manage to undo the instillment of a certain amount of fear in the hearts of other girls like you? Will it empower them to walk alone at night, knowing that even if they are raped, the rapists will be caught and punished? The point which I am trying to make here is that the punishment doesn’t generally fit the crime. A crime such as rape or even assault and burglary can’t only be measured in terms of what happens in those five minutes. The impact it leaves on the victim and her loved ones is so deep it may never heal. People get scarred for life, the lasting impression of a malicious grin as someone clubs you on the head or forces you into submission on a dark night under the glow of owl’s eyes is something which haunts you every waking moment and changes you forever as a person.
I study in Los Angeles where there’s a big brouhaha at the start of a new school year about staying safe because crimes happen a lot around the campus. There are a myriad of security measures in place, but thefts and sexual assaults still keep happening at the rate of roughly one every fortnight. Assuming half of them go unreported, that’s one every week – quite a staggering number. People take extra precautions and lead their lives differently because they don’t feel safe. Given all this, what would you say to deleting all wrongdoers from the face of the earth? You snatch an iPhone from someone. How dare you? It’s his iPhone. Who gave you the right to take it away? You are the scum of the earth, not fitting to leave your footprints in this world. So die, bastard, die. Makes sense? This is what Light Yagami must have been thinking as he wrote on the pages of his Death Note. Some guy John is a criminal, will be jailed for one year, then will walk out as a free man with his crime forgotten or perhaps serving as encouragement for others like him who think it’s ok to do whatever they want. No, that just won’t do. Delete him and make the world a better place. Free it from all such Johns and Dicks (pun intended) and establish order. No crime, no wrongdoing. A perfect world. Is that a bad thing to ask for? And when L stands in his way, is it bad to want L to die? It will be sacrificing a pawn in a chess game to checkmate the opponent’s king. Remove those who stand in the way of establishing a flawless world and let perfectly ordered peace and safety prevail. Pretty neat, huh?
Except the question begs to be answered, who the hell is Light Yagami to decide all this and become the ‘god of the new world’? Well, to begin with, he is exceedingly intelligent. The god of the new world really cannot be someone like Misa Amane who doesn’t have a holistic sense of greater good in mind. Most people are like Misa, they seek out a niche for themselves to be happy in and stay happy. A little, starving boy in Somalia gets a job which pays for regular food and becomes happy. A girl in Budapest does not feel the need to learn any other language, just Hungarian is sufficient to find a lover and be happy forever in Hunga
ry. A Maori tribal can just count up to 5, but that’s all he needs to be happy. Basically people only go that many furlongs as is necessary to make themselves happy. Why bother about the rest of the world? BUT, and this is a big but, that’s not how Light Yagami’s mind works. You may call him ambitious and that’s probably a bad thing in this context, but he does have the foresight and mental resources to care about the whole world and strive to make it a better place. Even though his methodology may not be commendable, it is very effective. Almost every endeavour in this world becomes more difficult in implementation than in theory because of practical difficulties. Even a proven murderer can’t be sentenced to death straightaway because he can bring a lawyer, there will be protracted court proceedings and finally there’s a chance he may walk scot free, which in turn leads to the chance that he may commit more murders and heap more misery upon others’ lives. In Light’s world, as soon as the man was caught and his name and face shown on TV, he would be dead. Quick, efficient solution. Is that a bad thing?
L
L, for most watchers, is the hero of the series. He’s definitely the most charismatic character, with his sitting style, food habits and way of speaking. You can almost feel the gears churning in his head and the brain cells brimming with energy when he speaks. It’s raw clarity of thought spouting from his forehead like an arrow. Now put L’s tragic death out of your mind and think of his modus operandi. L was willing to torture interrogate Misa in a straitjacket for days even after it became clear that she had no knowledge of being the second Kira (achieved by relinquishing ownership of her Death Note). He kept Light and Soichiro locked up for 43 extra days after Light declared he was not Kira, a statement corroborated by the fact that criminals were still dying without Light possibly being able to kill them. But these are nothing compared to L’s treatment of human lives for his own benefit. Remember Lind L. Tailor dying in Episode 2 Confrontation? L later said ‘I had my guy up there’. He had his guy go up on stage and die to get L one step closer to Kira. Later, L was going to test the Death Note the way a student might test for a chemical in a lab. Test a Death Note? Seriously? For a guy who is supposed to be o
n the good side? What does this say about L? Is he any different from Light? In L’s defence, he was doing his duty. He had taken it upon himself to find and stop Kira and people like Lind L. Tailor were mere sacrificial pawns in achieving his ends. If L would not have been willing to play with a few lives, Kira would have been that much harder to catch and there would have been more criminal deaths. One might say L decided to sacrifice one or two people to prevent the deaths of thousands in the hands of Kira. Well, Light decided to sacrifice a thousand criminals in order to make the world a better place for the billions that remain. Isn’t the principle the same? L does not care about human lives when they stand in his way to achieving his goal. Light does not care about human lives when they stand in his way to achieving his goal. What Light does on a bigger scale, L does on a smaller scale. But he still does it. If the question is of morality and not of scale, then shouldn’t Light be pardoned for doing short-term bad to achieve long-term good? L is sympathized with and glorified for the way he tracked down Kira. Why not glorify Light for his lofty ideals? How many people would even dare to use a terrifying device such as a Death Note in such an enormously purgatory way as Light attempted?
Near
It was fascinating (and perhaps a bit tiresome) to watch how similar Near’s mannerisms were to L’s. The obsession with childish things for example. L loved cakes. He treated sugar cubes like Lego. He had no dress sense. Near had a set of train tracks. He built matchstick castles. And his smile is the most babyish thing I have seen in the whole series. Yes, this one on the left. 
Eccentric geniuses is a cliched concept, but it never ceases to amuse me. It’s nature’s way of saying to the world ‘Hey look, these guys have been born with far greater intelligence than most others. They can see through things which you can’t. So pardon them for not exactly being stereotypical people.’ Do real people in the world behave differently and become weird when they start using more brain cells?
I like to think of it this way. Let’s say you’re working on a problem. It could be any problem which is substantially bothering you. To use my own example, since I am a PhD student, the problem could be that I am trying to make sense of seemingly nonsensical data which I got from an experiment. After trying for several days, an epiphany suddenly hits me and I discover a theory which exactly fits the data and explains everything. Yes, everything! It’s a Eureka moment. It must happen to you as well, that sudden flash of ‘Aah, of course! How could I be so blind?’. Now think of your actions immediately following the epiphany. Don’t you behave a bit differently than your normal self? You become oblivious to the world around and the weight of your entire focus falls on the problem, slicing through it like a knife edge and taming the beast. Once that’s done, you go back to your usual self and become aware of the surroundings once again. Now, imagine that instead of solving a single problem, you are confronted with a series of never-ending problems and your mind is constantly experiencing epiphanies which tackle one problem after another. In such a situation, will you be living normally and stopping to do things like saying ‘Hi’ to your office colleagues every time you see them or shopping for groceries? Not likely. Your entire demeanour will take on a different form and you’ll be lost in a world of your own where problems arise like tigers in a jungle licking their lips and you, the hunter, spear them one after the other. Your reality becomes alternating states of frustration, vigilance and ‘Eureka’. You aren’t the same, casual, banal person any more. In those rare moments when there isn’t a tiger in front of you, you imagine tigers appearing and keep wielding your spears – this state of omnipresent alertness and challenge is something that’s part and parcel of you, it defines you as a person and you can’t snap out of it. Now does L’s arrangement of sugar cubes to make a tower in his leisure time make sense? His brain cells need to feed on something, otherwise they start rusting. It’s like the movie Crank, the guy needs to keep adrenaline coursing through his body continuously to prevent himself from dropping dead. The same thing, just replace adrenaline with grey matter. That’s a genius. The world is enriched by their presence.
More stuff
There’s more stuff I want to talk about, but I’ll refrain since they haven’t formed concretely in my head. Such as the characters of Rem and Ryuk. Ryuk didn’t just play the role of comic relief, some of his dialogues were, just like he characterized humans, so interesting. Speaking of comic relief, the degradation of Misa’s role into nothing but that in the latter half of the series didn’t go down too well with me. And there are several individual episodes I want to discuss, the most prominent being Ep 7 Overcast. I might do another article on Death Note some time, the series is just too good to watch once and dismiss.
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