Touta Matsuda

Brown eyes and dark hair give Matsuda a youthful, unremarkable look. Early on his hair drapes past his ears, with a fringe that leans toward the right side of his face. The years before the second arc trim it shorter, even as more of it spills across his brow. His complexion is pale and his height middling.

Matsuda functions as the story's everyman, the lens through which ordinary readers experience the hunt, and his back-and-forth feelings about Kira capture that role. Inexperience shows badly at first, when his rash impulses snarl the investigation and earn eye-rolls from seasoned colleagues like Ryuzaki and Aizawa, who write him off as a naive hothead. Yet the same recklessness keeps turning into nerve. He is among the handful who refuse to walk away once Kira starts hunting the hunters, he slips into the Yotsuba Group to overhear its executives plotting, and he volunteers as live bait to draw out Higuchi knowing a single misstep could end him.

For all his blundering, he proves his worth as the case wears on, helping topple the Mafia members guarding a stolen notebook and showing a marksman's precision, whether knocking a notebook from a gangster's grip or later knocking the pen from Light's grasp. He stays fiercely loyal to the Task Force, devoted above all to Soichiro Yagami, who mentors him from the start. His sympathy for Kira's followers runs deep; he believes the killer meant well but chose a monstrous path. That fondness for Light makes the betrayal cut harder, and when Light confesses without remorse for his own father's death, Matsuda empties his gun into him in fury. Even so, he is left wondering whether stopping Kira truly bettered the world.

Matsuda enters the Kira case knowing little, even needing Soichiro to explain who the mysterious L is at his first international briefing. When he voices reasons the killer might be justified, the room shuts him down, though Soichiro privately reassures him the thought was worth raising. After Kira murders the dozen FBI agents L deployed and most investigators flee, Matsuda is one of the few who remain alongside Soichiro, Mogi, Ide, Ukita, and Aizawa, taking on the cover name Matsui as the team works in secret with L.

Eager to contribute during the Yotsuba phase, he poses as Misa Amane's manager, sneaks into the company's headquarters, and is caught eavesdropping. L talks him through an escape: feigning drunkenness, he tips off a balcony and is saved by a hidden mattress while Aiber stands in for his corpse. He later dangles himself as bait on a Sakura TV broadcast, 'accidentally' flashing his face so the Yotsuba Kira will chase his name, a gambit that ends with Higuchi cornered and the notebook recovered.

With L dead, the squad answers to Light as the new L. Years on, when Mello abducts Sayu Yagami for the notebook, Soichiro insists on making the Shinigami Eye bargain in Matsuda's place and dies in the raid. Clinging to his faith in Light, Matsuda keeps hoping the evidence will clear him, right up to the showdown at the Yellow Box Warehouse. There Near's trap finally proves Light is Kira, and as Light reaches for a scrap of notebook to kill the boy, Matsuda guns him down, nearly finishing the job before the others pry the weapon away.

A year after Light dies at Ryuk's hand, Matsuda floats the idea that Near wrote in the notebook to frame Mikami, only for Ide to note the theory springs from his lingering affection for Light. In the later Never Complete one-shot, he bursts onto a live Sakura TV feed to warn the public against buying Kira's power and flashes his badge as a threat of arrest, a stunt that only lends the sale credibility, earns a dressing-down from his superiors, and lands him on desk duty.