Term · Death Note
Kira
The nickname arrived before the suspect did, invented online by people who thought the deaths were a good thing.
In Otakana the clue reads: The name the public gives the killer
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Death Note
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Criminals start dying of heart attacks, in numbers no coincidence covers, and nobody knows who is doing it. Japanese message boards get there first. They call the unseen killer Kira, from the English word killer bent through Japanese phonetics, and they argue about whether he deserves thanks. Light Yagami hates the name at first. He adopts it anyway, because a name is what a god of the new world needs.
Naming the thing changes it. Kira becomes a brand with worshippers, a website, a television spokesman and a body count that drops violent crime worldwide. The police are chasing a person. The public is following a movement, and a fair share of that public would rather the person kept working. That split is the argument Death Note runs on for 108 chapters.
Tsugumi Ohba wrote the manga and Takeshi Obata drew it, in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003 to 2006. Madhouse animated it in 2006. The word travelled further than the story: police in several countries have handled real threats signed with the name, which is a strange afterlife for a nickname coined by fictional forum posters.
Spelling KIRA
KIRA is four letters and no trap, as long as you remember it is English wearing a Japanese coat. The word is written as the katakana for killer, cut short at the point Japanese phonetics run out, and the row stops there. Do not reach for KIRRA or KILLA. Two vowels, two consonants, strict alternation.