Fake Death Notes

The replicas look and feel like ordinary notebooks but carry no lethal power, serving instead as bait. They surface late in the story, when the contest between Kira and his pursuers comes down to deception rather than killing, and a single misplaced trust in the wrong book decides who falls. Both Light and Near build their final strategies around persuading the enemy that a counterfeit is genuine.

Light has Teru Mikami parade a counterfeit in public while under watch by the Special Provision for Kira, arranging for Kiyomi Takada to perform the real killings using pages torn from the authentic book. Near sees through the ruse, recognizing that Mikami's displayed notebook is false, and orders Stephen Gevanni to manufacture a duplicate of his own. Mikami unwittingly writes in the substitute that Gevanni and Anthony Rester prepared, mistaking it for the real thing, and the slip damns both himself and Light as Kira.

The films and television drama recast the trick in different shapes. The film Death Note: The Last Name sees L plant a forgery that fools Light into killing his own father, exposing him. The TV drama has L and Watari supply fakes to both Light and Mikami, each of whom incriminates himself while reaching to kill an enemy. Author Tsugumi Ohba once weighed an alternative plan involving laminated pages before abandoning it, and he has hinted that Light's later claim of a planted fake notebook may not have been wholly untrue.