Minoru Tanaka

Brown hair styled in a two-block cut sits above matching brown eyes, on a frame of fairly ordinary height. Out of his school uniform, he tends to favor a white jacket paired with blue trousers.

What sets Minoru apart is a sharp, calculating mind his report card never reflects. He scores worst in his classes yet thinks his way around problems with ease, building the notebook's sale around the surveillance technology that has tightened in the years since the original Kira. Facing him, Near conceded defeat for the first time in his tenure as L, never managing to locate the boy. Where Light burned with conviction, Minoru carries none. He refuses to wield the Death Note himself, yet feels no qualm about handing it to whoever can pay, indifferent to their intentions. When the United States and China both dress their bids in talk of noble purpose, he cuts them off to say the reason bores him and only the figure matters. His scheme, almost by accident, pours enormous wealth into Japan: the windfall ignites an economic surge around the capital that becomes known as the Reiwa or Kira Bubble, and the public hails Kira as a god all over again.

Raised in Japan, Minoru spends his early school years topping the country's intelligence rankings, a boy with a measured IQ of 182 who nonetheless flunks his actual coursework out of sheer laziness. In 2017, stewing over another failed exam, he meets Ryuk, who offers up the same notebook that powered Kira ten years before. Minoru grasps its history at once but argues that modern tracking makes a killing spree unwinnable, so he hands the book back and tells the Shinigami to return in two years.

When Ryuk reappears in 2019, the plan is set. Avoiding the traceable internet, Minoru has the Shinigami raise a teleprompter at a TV station and announce a live auction, routing Ryuk underground between home and studio so no camera can follow the invisible figure. Near, tagging him a-Kira, expects an online payment to expose him and settles in to watch. A panicked Matsuda storms Sakura TV to halt the broadcast, only to be recognized as a Kira-case veteran, which ironically certifies the auction as real and earns him a demotion to desk work. The bidding narrows to two governments, and Minoru awards the notebook to the United States for a quadrillion yen. To bury the money trail, he has Ryuk instruct that the sum be split equally into the bank accounts of every Tokyo resident under sixty, defeating Near, who abandons the chase. Once payment clears, Minoru sends the Death Note off to the American president and orders Ryuk never to come back. He does not know that the King of Death has just decreed that any seller of a notebook dies the instant payment lands. Ryuk weighs a warning, then honors the boy's own dismissal and stays silent. Withdrawing his share at the bank, Minoru drops dead of a heart attack, his name written by Ryuk on the very page that once held Light Yagami's.