Death Note Trivia Quiz: Apples, Rules and the Kira Case

Trivia Quizzes Anime

A black notebook falls out of the sky into the grounds of a Tokyo high school and is picked up by Light Yagami, a top ranked student, the son of a senior police officer, and bored in a way he has never admitted to anyone. The rules are written inside the front cover. A person whose name is written in it dies, provided the writer has that person's face in mind, and the default cause is a heart attack within forty seconds unless something else is specified. Light tests it on a criminal named in a television news report, waits, and sees the death reported the same evening. Within a week he has settled into a routine of working through the crime pages after school, and the press has begun calling the unexplained deaths of convicts the work of Kira.

The detective who answers goes to work with a single broadcast. A man identifying himself as L appears on television, addresses Kira directly, calls him evil and dares him to respond. Light writes the name shown on screen, the man collapses on camera, and the real L comes through on audio to explain the trap. The dead man was a condemned prisoner named Lind L. Tailor, unknown outside a handful of files, and the broadcast had gone out only across the Kanto region. Kira is therefore in Kanto, can kill without touching or seeing a target in person, and reacts to provocation. Everything that follows proceeds from those three facts, extracted in about two minutes at the cost of one life.

Ryuk, the death god who dropped the notebook because he was bored in his own world, follows Light around visible to nobody else, refuses to help either side, and asks mainly for apples. The rules keep accumulating, and most of the tension comes from them rather than from any action sequence. A human can trade half of a remaining lifespan for eyes that read the true name and the time left to anyone in sight. A shinigami who extends a human life dies for it. Misa Amane, a model who acquires a second notebook and attaches herself to Light, has made that trade and can therefore do in a glance what L spends months trying to prevent. Light's answer to being suspected is to join the task force hunting Kira, seated next to his own father.

Tsugumi Ohba wrote the manga and Takeshi Obata drew it, serialised in Weekly Shonen Jump between December 2003 and May 2006 and collected in twelve volumes. Madhouse adapted it into thirty-seven television episodes across 2006 and 2007. The structure is unusual for the magazine that ran it. The protagonist is the villain, the conflict is conducted almost entirely through deduction and misdirection rather than fighting, and the story removes its most popular character partway through, then restarts with two successors raised in the same orphanage. Live action films, a Japanese television drama, stage musicals and an American adaptation followed, and schools in several countries confiscated imitation notebooks once students started writing classmates' names inside them. The correct answers appear beneath the quiz.