Death Note

Outwardly a death note resembles an ordinary black notebook with ruled white pages, though a god of death may decorate the cover or leave it plain, and rarer copies arrive in red or white. The book quietly adapts to whatever writing format an era favors, having taken the form of a scroll in ancient Japan and something like a bound scripture in medieval Europe. No matter how many names fill it, the pages never run dry. Its material lies beyond human science, yet the thing handles like any notebook and can be torn or burned. Its single purpose is to claim human lives, and in doing so it extends the lifespan of the god of death who owns it.

A staggering body of rules governs the book, but everything rests on one principle: any individual whose name it records is doomed to die. The writing must be paired with the victim's face in mind, which spares people who happen to share a name. Absent a stated cause, death arrives by heart attack roughly forty seconds later, though a writer may postpone the killing by as much as twenty-three days; once a cause is named, the finer details can still be added inside the following six minutes and forty seconds. Conditions only take hold if the victim could plausibly carry them out, and a writer may even record a cause before supplying the name. The King of Death authors and revises every one of these laws as he sees fit.

During the manga and anime, several notebooks reach the Human World, each commonly labeled by the god of death who first held it. The one Light Yagami begins with traces back to Sidoh and passes through a long chain of hands that includes Rem, Kyosuke Higuchi, and Soichiro Yagami. Gelus's book becomes Misa Amane's and later Teru Mikami's, Rem's own notebook circulates among Light and the Yagami family, Ryuk keeps his throughout, and Midora's spare eventually reaches Minoru Tanaka by way of C-Kira. Gods of death typically use the books to kill humans glimpsed through the observation hole in their realm, banking the victims' remaining years, while a rogue few drop extra copies into the human world for mortals to find. Near once branded the notebook the worst instrument of murder in human history, a verdict the story repeatedly bears out.