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Dark rings sit permanently beneath his eyes, the mark of an insomniac who rarely sleeps. He is tall and gaunt, his skin pale, his black hair left untidy at roughly neck length. His wardrobe never varies: faded denim paired with a loose white top whose sleeves are always long. Footwear holds no appeal for him, and he drifts through public spaces barefoot, his spine curling forward into a slouch whenever he moves.

Secrecy defines how he operates. The public never sees him; he filters every contact through his handler, Watari, and brands himself with nothing more than an ornate capital letter. Even the task force he eventually joins is told to address him as Ryuzaki, his real name kept from them entirely. Beneath a sluggish, rumpled exterior hides one of fiction's sharpest analytical minds, and many who meet him underestimate the deductive power that slouch conceals. He second-guesses everything placed before him, weighs it with obsessive care, and feels no shame about bending rules or staging elaborate deceptions to corner a target. When he assigns a suspect some low probability of guilt, the figure is usually a lie; privately he may be all but certain. His own creator once joked outright that the man simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

A dry, occasionally cutting wit surfaces in his remarks, and his blunt observations can read as rude or superior. His habits are stranger still: he perches in a crouch rather than sitting properly, insisting that his reasoning would collapse by forty percent otherwise, pinches objects between fingertip and thumb, and survives on a diet of cakes, candy, and fruit. Despite all the sugar he stays thin, reasoning that thought burns more energy than any other activity. For all his idle posture, he was once a junior tennis champion in England and handles himself capably in a fight.

Watari discovered him as an eight-year-old and brought him to Wammy's House, an English institution for exceptionally gifted children. Recognizing the boy's gifts, the old man began aiding his investigations, and the young prodigy rose to become the most respected detective alive. The Kira affair begins when he notices a wave of convicts dropping dead from heart failure and concludes that a single culprit, based in Japan, is responsible. To flush him out, he broadcasts a condemned inmate posing as himself; Kira kills the decoy on air, confirming both the killer's reality and his rough location. A trail of dead investigators and a too-flawless alibi steer his attention toward the Yagami family, and one son in particular strikes him as suspiciously perfect.

Enrolling at To-Oh University under a borrowed celebrity name, he introduces himself directly to Light, gambling that open confrontation will rattle his quarry without provoking a fatal misstep. The rivalry that follows runs for months: a tennis match, a stated one-percent suspicion, a cafe full of psychological traps, and eventually a chain of handcuffs binding the two men together. He exposes Misa Amane as the second Kira, endures Light's voluntary confinement, and chases the Yotsuba killings to Kyosuke Higuchi, where the notebook itself and the shinigami Rem are finally laid bare. His insistence on testing the thirteen-day rule seals his fate. Watari dies of a heart attack moments after wiping the case files, and Rem, manipulated into shielding Misa, writes the detective's name as well. He slips from his chair as Light's triumphant grin tells him his suspicions were right all along. His death sends an automatic alert back to Wammy's House, and two of its students, Near and Mello, take up the hunt to finish what he started.