Taro Kagami

As a youngster Taro has smooth black hair falling to his cheeks and dresses in a school uniform of white collared shirt and trousers. Grown to adulthood, his face comes to look strikingly like that of Teru Mikami.

Taro is a put-upon student whose conscience runs deeper than Light's ever would. The deaths he causes haunt his sleep, and he goes out of his way to bring the victims back rather than let them stay gone. Even so, a darker temptation flickers in him when he muses that the notebook might be turned toward shaping a better world, an idea that earns Ryuk's approval, and tellingly he never surrenders the book he keeps hidden.

At thirteen, Taro picks up a Death Note and assumes it is an ordinary diary, recognizing only the English word printed on its cover. Using it as a journal, he unknowingly stops the hearts of two classmates who had bullied him, Suzuki and Tanaka. When the harassment continues even after their deaths, he looks the word up, grasps the notebook's real nature, and yet keeps writing, claiming several more tormentors in the process. The book's first owner, Ryuk, then appears, having dropped it out of sheer boredom, and explains exactly what Taro has been doing.

Guilt-ridden by nightmares, Taro accepts a Death Eraser from Ryuk and revives Suzuki and Tanaka. The relief is short-lived: when two detectives return to question the resurrected boys, the pair, three other bullies, and both officers all suffer fatal heart attacks at once, and the school is shut down. Taro soon discovers that Ryuk has let a second notebook slip into the world, and that a fellow victim named Miura found it and carried out the killings.

Miura turns on Taro and then tries to write his own name in despair, but Taro stops him, erases the names, and revives the officers. To convince the lawmen, Taro lets himself be killed and restored as living proof. Miura's notebook is seized and burned, its secret buried from the public, yet Taro quietly holds on to his own. Seven years later the Death Note has grown into a cultural rumor whose truth no one can settle, and a twenty-year-old Taro is last seen beside Ryuk, scoffing at a public survey about it.