Character · Death Note
Near
He solves the case sitting on the floor in white pyjamas, building a tower out of dice.
In Otakana the clue reads: Toy-stacking successor to a great detective
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Death Note
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Near is the other successor out of Wammy's House, ranked first, and his method is to sit very still. He stacks dice, finger puppets and dart-covered toys while he thinks, and the towers get taller as the reasoning gets closer. It looks like play. It works more like the way some people fidget with a pen, except that the pen is a scale model of the case.
He inherits the investigation from a predecessor who was better at it and he knows it. Where L enjoyed the argument, Near only wants the answer, and he will let other people take the risks to get there. He sets up his own agency in America, keeps a small team, and refuses to be hurried by anyone including the president.
His real name is Nate River. Between them, he and Mello split the qualities of the detective who raised them. The patience went one way and the appetite went the other, and the second half of the story is mostly an argument about which half mattered.
Spelling NEAR
NEAR is four letters and an ordinary English word, so the trap is not the sound but the order: EA, never AE. Both successors were handed short English aliases built from common words, MELLO out of mellow and NEAR out of near. There is nothing Japanese to unpick, which makes this one of the friendlier Death Note rows.