What is the Death Note?

*Originally published on 4/5/12



As the name would suggest, this particular item is a "note of death", or a notebook of death to be more precise.

It is a means for shinigami, supernatural death gods, to carry out their task in killing people, as well as extending their own lives. A name gets written in the book and that person dies soon afterward. If a shinigami kills a person with the death note, the remaining years of that person's life will be added to the life span of the shinigami instead.

That's the death note in a nutshell, but there are various rules that are established early on in the series, as well as other rules that are discovered later.

For example, you have to use the person's full name and have to picture the person's face as you put in the entry. This ensures that you don't kill someone else who happened to have the same name as the person you had intended to kill.

The wielder of the death note can control things like time of death as well as cause, but they need to be specified within a certain time limit after putting the name into the notebook.

The cause of death needs to be written down within 40 seconds; otherwise the person will just die of a heart attack. If a cause is put in, you will have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to specify the circumstances that lead up to it.

Light, the main character of the series, uses this to his advantage in devising strategies in order to keep his cover as well as to take care of his enemies.

While the death note is powerful, it does have limits. You can't have your victims do the impossible (like go from Japan to France in an hour) nor can you have them recall information that they don't have or reference something that they are unfamiliar with.

There are some downsides. As the notebook is linked to the shinigami who carried it, any human who picks it up will be linked to said shinigami until either the person's death or until someone else gets their hands on the death note.

More than that, ownership of the death note pretty much means that your soul is forfeit. There is no longer any question of whether you go to Heaven or Hell; you don't get either one.

It's a powerful item that can be used in a variety of ways. It's hardly the ideal thing to use, as it does forfeit your soul and generally turns you into a mass murderer with a god complex, but it is a unique item and does raise a lot of questions in regards to morality.