SMOKE AND MIRRORS
nagashi no kuro
Death Note © Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
I.
reality
(現)
side note I
On September 28, 2007, the severed lower half of a Caucasian male was found in Belgium. Beside the remains lay two notes that read, in romaji: watashi wa Kira desu.
"I am Kira."
The crime was given a special nickname by the Belgium media: Mangamoord —manga murder. To them, it was an opportunity to seize readership.
The internet manga community exploded into discussion, with wannabe "L"s making extrapolations about the murderer, and wannabe "Soichiro"s attempting to placate the others, and wannabe "Matsuda"s pointing out the obvious. To them, it was an opportunity to expound upon what they had only ever read about in books.
The rest of the world murmured, troubled, as it had always done, whispering about the twisted ideals of Japanese comics, the corruption of today's youth. To them, it was an opportunity to comment and purge.
But there was one fact that no one could deny.
It was a reminder, horrifying and fascinating, of what happened when imagination became all too real.
My name is Yue.
No, not really.
But you understand, right? In a world like this, dangerous and untrustworthy, giving out your real name to anyone is impossible. Hence, I picked out an alias. It was a name close enough to my real one that I wouldn't stop and look confused if someone used it.
On November 28, 2010, I was a high school student in the United States of America.
An ordinary high school student. No danger. No distrust. No aliases. A normal happy family, a close circle of sort-of friends.
I lived in an area where almost everyone was well off—not rich, per se, but above average. A school where drugs and gang violence were almost unheard of. I was Chinese-American, and studying to get into a good college was my primary pastime. The other pastime was, of course, reading manga, but doing so wasn't really a big deal. Almost everyone I knew read manga or watched anime; they just weren't as into it as I was.
But I digress.
On November 28, 2003, I was nothing more than an ordinary high school student.
"What'd you get on the chem test?" one of my classmates said, slapping her paper on my desk. "Look—35 out of 40. Three points away from the curve, damn it. I bet you got better."
I shook my head. "33."
Her face fell. "O—oh." Awkwardly, she tried to cheer me up. "But your grade's still an A, so it doesn't matter, right?"
"Mm, it doesn't matter."
"R-right…" She shifted from foot to foot. What was her name again? Rachel? Rebecca? "Well, I should go check my overall."
"Yeah, you should." I watched her go with passive eyes, then returned to flipping through my textbook. She was a nice enough girl, I guess. I'd never really talked with her much about anything besides grades.
Then again, there wasn't anything else for me to talk about with most of my peers besides grades. Pop culture, the latest styles, the funniest YouTube stars—none of it interested me. The things I loved, like anime—none of it interested them.
And the people who it did interest—I suppose, looking back, that we were kind of social outcasts. None of us had ever noticed it, though. Being used to it, and being fine with it, made us immune to odd looks and whispers in the hallway.
There were a few things that we had in common with the rest of our school, though, interest in grades and colleges being the first. The fierce competition. The strive for the top. Curiosity and nosiness—who was getting in where, what summer programs people were planning on applying for, which internship so-and-so had managed to snag, how many hours of community service he-or-she had completed—
Pointless.
Who cared, really? It wasn't as if success in high school affected success in real life. You could graduate a valedictorian and die a hobo.
Well, it wasn't like I stood out much from the crowd. Thoughts were just thoughts, after all. On the surface I was just like everyone else: trying to get into a top university, buying textbooks with my parents' money rather than an iTouch or a new laptop, bemoaning the potential loss of my straight As.
The bell rang.
"Remember, your semester project is due two days from now," the teacher intoned. "You have a quiz on gas laws this Friday. The homework is on the board…"
There was a chorus of "goodbyes" as we left, but most of us simply scrambled, like so many rats, to pack away our textbooks and binders and get home.
"That was bad, huh?" Another classmate laughed. David. We weren't particularly close, but he was part of our circle of weirdoes, if a little loosely. "I think my grade went down three percent just with that one test."
"Good for you." I grinned at him to show him I was joking. He rolled his eyes.
"Thanks for the support. How'd you do?"
"Probably worse. It was pretty awful."
"Aw, come off it. I bet you got a 90, didn't you?" He waited, but I didn't reply. "Alright, don't tell me if you don't want to. More importantly, have you seen the Death Note movie yet?"
"No, have you?"
Banter. The idle chatter of ordinary classmates.
"I heard they're showing it in anime club tomorrow. Subbed."
"Are you se—geh!"
In a splendid, extraordinary demonstration of feminine gracefulness and serenity, I had tripped and now lay sprawled on the ground like a crushed frog. David snorted.
"Good job."
"Shut up," was my clever reply. I sat up, rubbing the back of my bruised head. "Ow…what did I trip over, anyway?"
"Looks like someone's book." He bent down and picked it up with one hand, flipping through it. "Or some kind of diary."
From my vantage point, and from the way he was holding it, I had a very, very good view of the front cover. "Lemme see that!"
David blinked when I sprang up and wrested it from his grip. "Geez, what's your problem?"
I flipped through the pages the way he had, excitement building. "David, check it out! It's a Death Note! Legit like the anime and everything—it's even got the rules written in them! And it looks brand new, there aren't any names written in it yet! How lucky is this?" I blabbered on with the excitement of an anime fan who had just discovered a piece of free merchandise, but he looked at me blankly.
"Uh—okay. If you say so."
I rolled my eyes. "Are you stupid? Look!" I shoved the thin black notebook in his face. "See? DEATH NOTE. What's wrong with you? I thought you were a true fan—you disappoint me."
"Fan of what?" Now he just looked confused, and I was the one looking at him strangely.
"Uh. Death Note?" When he made no expression of recognition, I prompted him again. "Light Yagami? Ryuzaki? Ryuk the Shinigami? Criminals dying? The movie we're watching in anime club tomorrow?"
His face remained confused. "What are you talking about? What does The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya have to do with criminals?"
I scowled at him. "David, that's not funny."
"Hey, I knew you took anime seriously, but I didn't think you took it that seriously."
"Do you seriously have the memory span of a goldfish? I thought you were joking when you said that. You just told me two minutes ago that we were watching Death Note in anime club tomorrow."
"I never said that," he said, growing frustrated. "I said we were watching Disappearance. You sure you're not the one with short-term memory loss?"
"Positive." But I really wasn't that sure. I tended to be absent-minded, and sometimes had the bad habit of tricking myself into remembering something that had only happened in my head. "Well, whatever. We'll just see in anime club tomorrow, right? No big deal." I had a sudden thought. "Hey, you don't want the Death Note, do you?"
He shrugged. "Keep it. Why would I want a diary?"
I opened my mouth to remind him that it wasn't a diary, it was a Death Note that could go for ten bucks on eBay, but he'd already started to walk off. I sighed and shook my head. Clearly he wasn't as serious about anime as my friends and I were. Maybe I'd even weirded him out a little. Well, if I had, I guess I could apologize tomorrow, but for now, I had a Death Note!
I opened it again as I started my walk home, just to make sure it was legitimate and not some piece of cheap junk. There was no sign of the buyer or seller, not even a price sticker or a company name, but maybe they'd wanted it to look more official. I'd never actually seen a real Death Note before, so I couldn't be sure if that was common practice. The first few pages, though, made me certain of its legitimacy. They were black and emblazoned with the title: HOW TO USE.
Wow, seriously lucky. I can't wait to tell everyone about this.
The rules were in messy, uneven but still legible font. I didn't remember if it was exactly Ryuk's handwriting, but it was still cool and I could compare with my friends later—several of them had Death Notes, too. I knew I was never going to use this (even if it wasn't a Death Note, I usually never used any of my anime merchandise anyway; it all sat in my room, looking untouched and brand new), but reading the rules straight from a book was still a thrilling experience.
1.1 ENTERING NAMES. The human whose name is written in this note shall die. This note will not take effect unless the writer has the subject's face in mind when writing his/her name. This is to prevent people who share the same name from being affected.
I'd reached the front of my house. I unlocked the door with a sigh, looked at the doormat: only one pair of shoes. "I'm home."
"Oh, you're home, Yue?" my grandma shouted from the kitchen. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes; it wasn't her fault she was practically half-deaf.
"Yes, Grandma, I'm home!"
"Do you want some fruit?"
"No thanks, I'm not hungry."
"Okay," I could see her nodding complacently, and then going back to making dumplings or steam buns or whatever she was up to this time. My grandma loved cooking; it was one of the reasons she liked staying here, where Chinese cuisine the way she made it was a rarity that everyone appreciated.
I stepped into my room, where a plethora of anime posters lined the walls. The first thing I noticed, though, was—
"Hey, where's my poster of L?"
I didn't have that many posters, and I didn't tend to be very obsessive over them, so it would usually take me a few days before realizing there was one gone. This one, however, was the only one on the back of my door, so it was hard to miss.
My first thought was that it'd fallen on the ground, but a quick check proved that wrong. Then I immediately thought of my little sister, who had a bad habit of taking my things, but a search through her room proved fruitless.
Maybe she took it to school with her this morning, I thought exasperatedly. I guess I'll ask her when she gets home.
So I set the Death Note down on my desk, and for the next hour the missing poster slipped from my mind as I finished off my homework.
Then I stood up to take a break, and remembering the Death Note again, figured I should set it next to the rest of my Death Note things (which included the two light novels, volume 12, Death Note 13: How to Read, and a collection of fanart). I turned to my bookshelves, but…
There wasn't a huge empty space where my Death Note things should be.
No, my other books still fit together perfectly, in alphabetical order, still filling up the bookshelf the way I liked it.
But.
"What the hell?"
Death Note: Another Note, volume 12, even the fanart—all of it was gone.
Had my little sister gone and taken all of my stuff? But no, she was annoying, but she wouldn't do something like that. And I'd just looked through her room without finding anything; she couldn't have taken it all to school.
Then where—?
Thus began a frantic overturning of my room. Not just my room, but the rest of the house, too. I checked the drawers no one had opened in years, the closet we never used—hell, I even checked the bathrooms, in case someone had taken the books in there for some reading while sitting in the loo, but no luck. I was forced to admit defeat, but I wasn't going to do it happily.
"Did someone steal them? Why on Earth would they—? No, there's no evidence of burglary, and my grandma's been home all day. She wouldn't let anyone in."
Reduced to talking to myself.
"What if someone did steal them, though? That'd actually be kind of interesting. A really rabid anime fan reduced to theft. Maybe they saw all my stuff through the window and decided to take it for themselves?" I didn't kid myself for long, though. "That's stupid. And anyway, why go just for Death Note? Why not anything else?"
Still, the thought plagued me. But what could I do about it? Call the police? Hi, I'm a high school student and I think an obsessive anime fan stole all my merchandise. Can you track him down so I can have my poster back?
Hilarious.
"Maybe I'm not the only one?"
There was another thought. Maybe this mysterious Death Note lover had hit more than one victim? After all, I hadn't really had much. The idea was still far-fetched, but I decided to turn on my laptop and open Google for some research.
Death Note theft, I typed.
"Theft: define Theft at …Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Mods…Robot Chicken ~ Grand Theft Mario Brothers…J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2008: For Preparing Your 2007 Tax Return…"
Okay. This wasn't working.
Obsessive Death Note fan, I typed.
"Super OCD-Television Tropes & Idioms…Monk (TV series)…Obsessive fan told to stay away from Madonna's New York City home…"
I gave up. There was clearly no Death Note-obsessed burglar out there, no matter how paranoid I was.
There was something that kind of bothered me about those search results, though. After all, with a fandom that big, even if you typed in something as stupid as "Death Note theft," you should still get results somewhat related to Death Note, right?
But none of the search results had actually mentioned Death Note at all. Hell, none of them even linked to anime fansites.
The irritation wouldn't go away. Part of it was my paranoia, but part of it was also my pride in being a Death Note fan. After all, Death Note had been one of the most popular manga out there for a while, even well-known among non-anime-fans, perhaps for different reasons.
So I opened Google again.
Death Note, I typed.
Five minutes later, I was almost ready to throw my computer on the ground in disbelief.
"What the—you can't be serious!"
"Death- Wikipedia the free encyclopedia…Notepad + + …San Francisco Genealogy, Obituaries and Death Notices…Department of Public Health: Birth and Death Records…Welcome to Empty Words…Google Notebook…What is note? Definition and Meaning…Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife…Blue Note Records…Death (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)—"
Nothing about Death Note.
None. Zero. Nada.
"Maybe there's something wrong with the search engine," I muttered to myself, my fingers tapping frantically at the keyboard. "Yeah, that's it. Maybe if I use different key words?"
Light Yagami, I typed.
"Light: define Light at …Yagami (surname) (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), Iori Yagami (SNK Playmore)…HowStuffWorks "How Light Works"…Yagami Ren-Drama Wiki…Christian Talk Radio: The Light for San Francisco…Taiko with Toni Yagami Japanese Percussion Ensemble…City Lights…Lamps Plus…"
"You can't be serious," I repeated, typing with increasing desperation.
Raito Yagami.
Near. Nate Rivers.
Mello. Mihael Keehl.
Soichiro Yagami. Touta Matsuda. Watari. Quilish Wammy. Wammy's House. L: Change the WorLd. Another Note Ryuk Shinigami Rem Misa Amane—
I came to a stop.
"Black Cherries~ MisaMisa's Homepage~ click here for English translation."
I obeyed.
"Home. Profile. History. News. Forum. Photos." What on Earth—? I clicked on a photo, hesitantly. A ditzy blonde smiled up at me cutely, in one of the flashiest Gothic Lolita outfits I'd ever seen.
"…a really good cosplayer?" I deduced. It's scary how good, though. She looks almost exactly like Misa from the movie, except with blonde hair. Wig? Dyed? No, definitely dyed. For a moment the anime fan in me itched to dissect the components of the cosplay, but I resisted.
The more important question was, why could I find a website about Misa, but not about any of the other characters who had much bigger fanbases?
And there was no mention of Death Note on the website, either. I scrolled through every page, even most of the forums, but found nothing.
Then again, this is an English translation. Maybe something didn't make it over. Google translates are pretty bad, after all.
Denial.
At that point, the truth had already begun to occur to me, but I couldn't believe it. I refused to believe it. After all, such things went against everything I knew about logic, science, the laws of the universe.
I reached for the phone. I had to dial several times before getting the right number, because my fingers were shaking so much.
"Hey, Elaine? Yeah, this is Yue. Do you still have your Death Note volumes, by any chance?"
"What are you talking about?"
I had to fight to stay calm. "Didn't you tell me before that you had all thirteen volumes of Death Note?"
"Wasn't me. I don't have any." I could practically hear her shrug over the phone, unconcerned. "Sorry, must've been someone else."
"Have you ever heard of Death Note, at least?" I gave it one last try.
"Nope. Is it good?"
"Ah—never mind, then. Don't worry about it." I paused before hanging up. "Elaine?"
"What's up?"
She was the anime club activities coordinator. She'd know, right? "What're we watching tomorrow?"
"The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. It's on the website, you can just check there, but I'm pretty sure."
My heart sank. "Oh. O-Okay. Thanks."
"Something wrong?" Now she sounded concerned. "You don't sound good."
"Don't worry about it," I repeated. "Thanks again, Elaine. Bye."
I vaguely heard her confused "bye" as I hung up, my hands shaking even more.
I knew for sure Elaine had owned all thirteen volumes of Death Note, and a fan Death Note herself besides. She loved it. She'd gone with me to see the first and second movies a few years ago. She even had the opening and ending songs of the anime on her iPod.
So, why? Why had she suddenly acted like she didn't know anything?
Why had she acted like Death Note had never existed for her?
She couldn't be playing a prank on me, could she? Maybe everyone else was in on it too. I knew several of our friends were computer savvy. They could've come in to my room under some pretense with my grandma, taken my books and poster, fiddled with my laptop…
Now that was paranoid, even for me. And Elaine wouldn't do something like that.
Suddenly, something occurred to me. A keyword I'd missed.
"Oh…oh, right! Why didn't I think of that before?"
So it was true that in panic, you tended to lose focus.
"Okay. Okay, let's try this. If this doesn't work, then—"
L Lawliet, I typed.
I tried to hide my disappointment when nothing relevant came up, again.
"That's just his full name, though. Maybe something else?"
Detective L, I typed.
I skimmed through the results: Detective-Wikipedia the free encyclopedia…L's Caffe…detective fiction…LaTeX-A document preparation system…Police and Detectives…Sherlock Holmes…Chicago "L".org…Private Investigators…there!
My mouse hovered what could finally be my salvation.
Detective L: Truth or fiction?
Heart in my throat, I clicked the link.
Not many know of L. Secretive, elusive, and fond of his privacy, he prefers to remain unremarkable to all those besides workers in organizations such as the FBI, the CIA, and various other international police and security departments. However, the truth of the matter is that L is a great detective, perhaps the greatest in the world, and has solved numerous difficult cases…
"What is this?"
This wasn't what I had been looking for. This was almost like the webpage about Misa. With a feeling of growing dread, I read the rest of the article.
…not much is known about him besides his great skill and knowledge. He usually keeps contact with other organizations through the computer. His true identity is kept secret for his own safety. Because of this, many in the police force have dubbed him the "armchair detective." However, it is this website's goal to reveal the truth about the elusive L…
Yes, almost exactly like the webpage of Misa. Both of them had seemed like…like…
Like Misa and L were real.
"Gahaha!"
I must have jumped about a foot in the air. If I could jump that high in PE, maybe I'd have a better grade there, I thought vaguely, before grabbing the nearest weapon—my biology textbook—and preparing to face the intruder.
What I saw before me made me forget the textbook completely.
A creature that was so horrible, so twisted, that I instinctively drew back. It was almost three times my size and looked something like a skeletal pterodactyl, but with its white bones sewn into place. Great, skeletal wings stretched out behind it and actually passed through the walls of my room before it settled in place on the back of my chair. There were arms—twisted, barely humanoid arms, looking as if it had stolen the arms of a skeleton and fixed them onto itself. It had empty sockets for eyes, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that there was still something staring at me there.
It was horrible. Yet, the artist in me—or at least the manga fan—couldn't help but appreciate the dark beauty within the horror, the design of something that could invoke such fear and repulsion in a human being.
And this creature wasn't human, at all. My eyes flickered to the little black book lying innocently on my desk. I must have gone crazy, unless—
"You…" I breathed. "You're a shinigami."
The Death Note. My missing merchandise. The lack of search results. David's and Elaine's lost memories. Misa's webpage. L.
The pieces had finally all clicked into place.
"Gahaha…" it—no, he—laughed, with laughter that sounded like blood and grating blades, darkly amused as it looked down at me.
Condescending. As if I were nothing more than a bit of lively entertainment. Perhaps that was how I might even have viewed my current situation, just a few hours ago.
I scrambled for my computer and found something there that made me almost scream. I practically flew under my desk for my cell phone, then under my bed for my iPod, then flipped through my books, my calendar, my planner.
"You're a funny human."
It was wrong. It was all, all wrong. No. Absolutely not.
Against the laws of the universe, and yet, here I was.
On November 28, 2010, I was an ordinary high school student, or so I'd like to believe.
November 28, 2003, though, was a completely different story.