Rules of the Death Note

These are the official guidelines that dictate how the notebooks function. Before he lets one fall into the living world, Ryuk jots down five of them so that whoever picks it up can understand the fundamentals, and many more come to light over the course of the series.

The core five establish the spine of the whole premise: a person whose name is entered will die; the writer has to fix that person's face in mind so others sharing the name stay untouched; a cause noted within forty seconds will come to pass; an unspecified cause collapses into a plain heart attack; and any further particulars must be added across the following six minutes and forty seconds. These appeared on the full-page How to Use It sections closing various manga chapters, running to roughly seventy pages in all, and were later regrouped by subject inside the Death Note 13: How to Read guidebook.

Ryuk is the hand behind the original five, written to give the finder a starting point. Light Yagami twists the framework by persuading Ryuk to add two counterfeit clauses, one claiming a user dies after thirteen days without an entry, the other threatening death to everyone who touched a book that gets burned, both planted to steer suspicion away from himself and Misa. Adaptations reshape the canon freely: the pilot chapter caps the notebook at sixty pages and offers a Death Eraser able to revive anyone not yet cremated, while the 2017 Netflix film makes a random accident the default end, limits control of a victim to two days, and allows a destroyed page to spare its intended target.