Kyosuke Higuchi

Higuchi's hair and eyes are both a deep brown, and he is almost always turned out in a black suit, often flashing a broad, disquieting grin. The Nintendo DS adaptation Kira Game instead colors his hair black.

Acquisitive, willful, and out for himself, Higuchi is precisely the kind of man Light wants in possession of a Death Note. Rem dismisses him as vile and pathetic, and his behavior proves her right: he wields murder to climb and kills on the smallest pretext. Arrogance rounds him out, shrugging off the net tightening around him as suspicion grows. Away from his crimes, he is a left-handed, kendo-ranked graduate of Wasegi University and the son of a Yotsuba executive.

Exposed eventually as the Yotsuba Kira, Higuchi is the third to wield Kira's power, after Light and Misa. Rem is the one who hands him the notebook, acting on Light's order to seek out someone grasping, pushy, and self-serving who would exploit it to climb in standing. Told to dispatch criminals as a matter of routine and otherwise use the book however he likes, Higuchi bends it toward business: each week the Yotsuba Group convenes to pick off executives at rival firms and keep their company on top. The others sense a Kira in their midst without pinning it on him, and while L circles the group, Higuchi kills fellow member Hatori for a reckless slip of the tongue.

Rem ultimately engineers his downfall, slipping Misa a fragment of his notebook so she can see the Shinigami. Playing on her own history as the Second Kira, Misa flatters Higuchi into admitting he is Kira, secretly tapes the exchange, and turns the recording over to the Japanese Task Force. His own colleagues, rattled by the rising body count, abandon him, and the Task Force lays its trap by putting Matsuda on Sakura TV as bait. Higuchi gains the Shinigami Eyes and speeds toward the station to silence Matsuda and protect his secret, only to be stopped cold by a masked police cordon that Aizawa has set, a turn that blindsides even L, who had told the police to stay clear of the arrest.

Cornered, Higuchi turns the gun on himself to avoid capture, but Watari, firing from a helicopter overhead, knocks the weapon from his grip. The arrest forces the reality of the Death Notes into the open, confirmed when Soichiro and L both glimpse Rem after handling the notebook; Light, handling it under the guise of inspection, recovers his memories as the original Kira and, with a scrap hidden inside his watch, sets down Higuchi's name.

Higuchi sits out Death Note: The Last Name, where Kiyomi Takada takes over as the third Kira and meets a nearly identical end at Light's hands. By contrast, the 2015 TV drama keeps his arc close to canon.