N-Suke Yamanaka

Age shows on him. A short crop of pale hair sits over heavy eyebrows, and he dresses in a suit set off by a plaid tie.

He works like a seasoned detective, alert to patterns others would miss and quick to find Taro Kagami unsettling. The case even prompts him to muse aloud on what a person might do if they could kill with nothing more than a thought, a question the story leaves hanging over him.

Partnered with his junior officer Takagi, Yamanaka looks into the deaths of five students at Taro Kagami's school, interviewing the bullied Miura before turning to Taro. The pattern nags at him, and he likens it to a case from the late 1970s at the Yamashita branch of the Takara Bank, where two heart-attack deaths were trailed by other deaths ruled accidental. When the five victims somehow come back to life, the inspectors return to ask them about the day they died, but the moment the children open their mouths to answer, they die a second time, and Yamanaka and Takagi drop dead alongside them. Their killer is Miura, who has been writing names in a Death Note; Taro later erases those names with the Death Eraser to revive them all. Persuaded to help Miura confess, Yamanaka watches the boys demonstrate the notebook by killing and reviving Taro, then burns the book, never suspecting that Taro is keeping a second one. Notably, the pilot states up front that the names of everyone involved were altered to guard their privacy, so 'N-Suke Yamanaka' is not what this inspector is actually called.