Naomi Misora

Naomi is a striking woman with long black hair worn above hazel eyes, a coloring the anime shifts toward a grayish blue. Black leather is her habitual wardrobe, a choice her own creators tied to mourning, and a fitting one for a figure the manga essentially built outward from her clothing.

Official material rates her a top-tier investigator with exceptional deductive instincts, sharp enough that L had relied on her during an earlier case. She is careful by nature, shielding herself behind a false name when she approaches a stranger, yet her great weakness is emotional: grief and feeling end up clouding the very acumen that makes her dangerous to Kira. She had walked away from the Bureau late in 2003, trading the work for the hope of marriage and a family in the United States.

Before the series, Naomi served the FBI with distinction and worked under L during the Los Angeles serial-murder investigation. She met Raye Penber, then resigned in the run-up to their wedding, planning a quieter life abroad. That plan dies with Raye. He comes home shaken from a bus hijacking, warns her to stay clear of the case for her own safety, and is killed by Kira days later. Convinced Kira is responsible and armed with Raye's mention that he had flashed his badge aboard the bus, she reasons that the murderer must have been a fellow passenger and sets out to reach the Task Force herself.

That search brings her to Light Yagami, who leverages his father's position as the investigation's chief to earn her confidence. Wary, she offers only the alias Shoko Maki, meaning to hold her real identity until she can deliver it to L. Light coaxes the truth loose by claiming to be a Task Force insider working directly with L and by dangling the chance to help catch her fiance's killer. He asks to verify her, she produces her driver's license, and with her true name in hand he writes it on a scrap of the Death Note. When she presses him on why he keeps glancing at his watch, he calmly answers that it is because he is Kira. The realization lands too late; he has already ordered her to take her own life. She drifts away from him, declines his offer to speak with his father, and walks off toward a waiting rope, her death staged as a hanging and her body, per Light's written instructions, never recovered.