Character · Death Note
Light Yagami
A seventeen-year-old with perfect grades decides the world needs cleaning and finds a notebook that does the work.
In Otakana the clue reads: Top student who finds a notebook on the ground
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Death Note
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Light Yagami is the top-scoring student in Japan, bored out of his mind, and the son of a police superintendent. He picks up a black notebook from the school grounds. The rules inside say that anyone whose name is written in it dies, and he spends a few pages proving to himself that the rules are real before he starts working through the criminal records his father brings home.
What follows is a detective story with the roles inverted. You watch the murderer plan and the investigation close in, and the tension comes from the gap between what Light knows and what L has guessed. He is charming, patient and completely certain, and the series keeps handing him victories that cost the reader a little more each time.
The Japanese name is a joke delivered with a straight face. It is written with the characters for night god and moon, Yagami Tsuki, and the moon character is simply read as Light. Ohba and Obata gave their killer a family name meaning night god and a first name meaning the opposite. Obata drew him beautiful on purpose, because the face is part of the trick.
Spelling LIGHT
LIGHT is an ordinary English word, and that is the whole difficulty: five letters with a GH doing nothing audible. The game wants the given name rather than YAGAMI. The character on the page is the moon, read as Light by authorial decision, so the spelling comes out of English and not out of any romanisation. I before GH, then T.