Death Note

Rebirth

23 min

Light Yagami, a high-school student bored out of his mind, picks up a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. He tests it half believing, and what waits on the other side is proof that it works and Ryuk, the shinigami who dropped it. Light decides he will wipe every criminal off the earth and become the god of the world he builds in their place.

Confrontation

23 min

As criminals keep dying of heart attacks, the world starts calling whoever is behind it Kira. L takes the case and springs a trap on live television that forces Kira into revealing he is somewhere in Japan's Kanto region. Stung by it, Light decides that L is the first person who has to die.

Dealings

23 min

L narrows his profile to a student with access to police information. As the net tightens, Ryuk offers Light a bargain: the eyes of a shinigami. The price is half of whatever life Light has left, and in exchange he would see any person's name and lifespan at a glance.

Pursuit

23 min

Realising he is being followed, Light stages an incident on a bus to draw the man out and learn who he is. The name that surfaces is Raye Penber, an FBI agent. Light uses him to collect the faces and names of the other agents, then kills twelve of them at once.

Tactics

23 min

Twelve FBI agents dying at the same moment terrifies the Japanese police. Officers walk away from the task force rather than risk their lives, until only five are left on the Kira case. The ones who stay choose to go on working with a man whose face none of them has ever seen.

Unraveling

23 min

Still keeping his face from them, L finally appears before the remaining investigators and lays out his profile of Kira. Meanwhile Naomi Misora, Raye Penber's fiancée, refuses to accept how he died and starts working it herself. What she pieces together brings her closer to Kira than anyone else has come.

Overcast

23 min

As Naomi tries to bring what she knows to the task force, Light approaches her by using his father's position. He gets everything he needs out of her, then writes her name in the notebook without hesitating. At the same time Watari begins handing surveillance equipment to the investigators.

Glare

23 min

Light works out, by pure observation, that hidden cameras have been installed throughout his room. While being watched he keeps following the news on a television he has concealed, and goes on writing names exactly as before. The footage gives away nothing at all, and L's suspicion quietly deepens.

Encounter

23 min

At the university entrance exams, L finally puts himself in front of Light in person. He gives the name Hideki Ryuga, and then tells him, quietly, that he is L. Each now certain of what the other is, the two settle into something shaped like friendship and start waiting for a mistake.

Doubt

23 min

Over a game of tennis, L keeps steering the conversation to the Kira case as though it were small talk. Cornered, Light proposes that he be confined, cut off from any news or television, for as long as it takes. The move is meant to prove his innocence, and it only makes L more interested in him.

Assault

23 min

Someone calling themselves Kira begins airing videos through Sakura TV, and the task force scrambles to stop the broadcasts. When an investigator dies inexplicably outside the station, L becomes certain there is a second Kira. Elsewhere, a young woman named Misa, who adores Kira, is talking with a shinigami of her own.

Love

23 min

L has Light go through the seized recordings, using the exercise to measure how his mind works. The task force puts out a broadcast designed to draw the second Kira into answering. Light, for his part, has already started thinking about how to use whoever is coming toward him.

Confession

23 min

Misa, who has the eyes of a shinigami, reads Light's real name out of a crowd and works out that he is Kira. She tracks him down in the middle of an investigation, tells him she knows exactly what he is, and confesses that she loves him. Whatever the eyes cost her, she does not regret a moment of it.

Friend

23 min

As Light sets about using Misa's feelings, Rem, the shinigami who protects her, warns him plainly that harming her means his death. He takes her on as a piece to play while struggling with how dangerous she is. L, meanwhile, has found enough odd correspondences in the broadcasts to be sure the two Kiras are working together.

Wager

23 min

L tells Light that if he dies, Light is to be arrested, laying down what amounts to a wager. Not long after, Misa is taken into custody as the second Kira and put through a punishing interrogation. Having given up ownership of her notebook, she loses every memory connected to it.

Decision

23 min

Cornered, Light says aloud that he may be Kira and asks to be confined himself. Without anyone noticing, he gives up ownership of the notebook, wiping his own memory clean along with it. The killings stop dead, then start again, and L's reasoning is shaken to its foundations.

Execution

23 min

To measure how Light and Misa react, L stages a scene made to look like an execution. What he sees pushes him toward concluding that neither of them is Kira after all. The task force moves its headquarters, and the shadow of a group of company men starts to come into view.

Ally

23 min

Still unable to let the suspicion go, L proposes chaining himself to Light by the wrist. Light objects and accepts anyway, and together they turn the investigation toward a new target. What has surfaced is the Yotsuba Group, a corporation apparently using Kira's power to make money.

Matsuda

23 min

To get inside Yotsuba, Matsuda goes in posing as Misa's manager. When the act nearly comes apart he gets word to L and chooses to fake his own death. The whole reckless business gives the team its first way into the company's private meetings.

Makeshift

23 min

To see inside Yotsuba's meetings, the task force wires the boardroom for sound and pictures. Chained together day after day, L keeps working on Light psychologically without letting up. At the same time Misa, still without her memories, is put to work getting inside the company.

Performance

23 min

Having worked her way inside the company, Misa names the third Kira outright. The trouble is how easily the answer came, which raises the question of how she could possibly have known. Watching her, L feels a suspicion he cannot dismiss beginning to settle again.

Guidance

23 min

L arranges a television special on Sakura TV carrying deliberately false claims, setting a trap for the third Kira. Several of the executives, promised immunity in exchange for cooperating, are used to steer him toward it. The point is to build a situation the man cannot answer without showing himself.

Frenzy

23 min

Caught by the trap, the third Kira drives for the television station having lost all composure. From the panic of it, L understands that the man has eyes that let him kill on sight of a face. The police close the net before he ever reaches the building.

Revival

23 min

The third Kira is arrested and the case looks closed. Then Light touches the notebook he hid away, and everything he was as Kira comes back to him at once. Wearing his old face again, he sets Misa moving and starts working out how to obtain L's real name.

Silence

23 min

To protect Misa, Rem makes the only move left and writes the names of L and Watari. In the moment the two stop breathing, the one adversary who ever came close to Kira is gone from the world. Light, who has even taken Rem's notebook once she crumbles to dust, is left alone with his victory.

Renewal

23 min

Lの後継として二代目を名乗った月は、その座から堂々と粛清を再開する。世界はキラの支配を受け入れはじめ、犯罪は目に見えて減っていく。物語は五年後の二〇一二年へと跳び、警察庁に身を置く月の姿を映し出す。

Abduction

23 min

Word of L's death reaches his two successors, Near and Mello, and both begin to move. Mello abducts Light's sister Sayu and demands the notebook as ransom. Near, for his part, has put together a new organisation to hunt Kira.

Impatience

23 min

To get his daughter back, Soichiro Yagami goes through with the handover of the notebook in Los Angeles. Sayu is released, but she comes home with her mind broken. Around the same time Mello attacks Near's organisation and kills most of it, and the surviving Near proposes working together with Light.

Father

23 min

Steered by Light, the team finally pins down the location of Mello's hideout. Soichiro takes the shinigami eye deal on the way in and reads Mello's true name off his face. He is shot down before he can write it.

Justice

23 min

Mello meets Near face to face and lays out what he knows about shinigami and the notebook's faked rules. Hating each other as they do, the two of them still draw the outline of Kira a little clearer between them. Light, meanwhile, goes as far as threatening the American president to find out where Near's organisation is.

Transfer

23 min

Followers of Kira attack Near's headquarters. To keep the scrutiny off himself, Light decides to put a proxy in place. The man he chooses is Teru Mikami, who believes in Kira as a god without a shred of doubt.

Selection

23 min

Mikami takes on the purge as the hand of his god and starts passing judgement himself. Light also selects Kiyomi Takada as the voice that will speak for Kira in public. Given the position of his lover, she spreads the faith from behind the broadcast desk.

Scorn

23 min

Near arrives at the suspicion that Mikami is the one now carrying out the killings. Pages from the notebook pass from Mikami to Takada, putting another layer between Light and the deaths. Between the two women around him, meanwhile, a different tension is quietly building.

Vigilance

23 min

Aizawa confirms that Light and Takada are passing written notes to each other in secret. On Near's side, Gevanni gets close enough to Mikami's notebook to photograph it page by page. Without anyone realising it, the circle is quietly closing.

Malice

23 min

Mello abducts Takada and is killed by the fragment of the notebook she has hidden on her. What waits for Takada once she gets free is the end Light has already arranged. To erase every link between them, he has her write her own death.

1.28

23 min

In an abandoned warehouse, Light and Near finally stand face to face. Light is certain that the notebook Mikami is carrying has been swapped for a forgery. If every part of the trap holds, Near and everyone with him die in that room.

New World

23 min

It is Near who has turned the trap around, and not one of the names written takes effect. Cornered at last, Light admits he is Kira, tries to run even so, and is shot by Matsuda. As he crawls away bleeding, Ryuk keeps the promise he made and writes his name.