« December 3, 2003. Strangely enough, it is only after Ryuk's arrival that you fall into an easy slumber, as though something about the bone-cold, looming figure was your own divine protection, despite the fact that there's nothing in him to trust. The physicality of your terror, perhaps; the definition of his ghoulish skin; the way he has a personality and speaks words like anyone else; you know how to deal with that, how to tug the current of others' thoughts. Even his threatening promise, that he will one day write your name down, feels more like a reprieve. 'One day' is not today. It is not tomorrow. For the past week you have been writing like a man in a frenzy, you have been losing weight and sleep and appetite as though you yourself would feel your heart give out at any moment, as though the divine would punish you. It has not. You are secure; you possess death and if you are possessed by it in turn this only proves how much you are chosen by fate. In any event Ryuk is almost as easy a pet to take care of as the insects you and Sayu used to keep hidden under your beds in glass jars; he requires only apples. »
—December 3, 2003. Strangely enough, it is only five days after Kira's appearance in the world that you fall into an easy slumber, as though something about the untouchable, looming figure was your own divine protection, despite the fact that there's nothing in him to trust. Kira is a murderer like any other but he only attacks criminals, so you are safe. Safe to observe the grand experiment with something like a low, building excitement. Perhaps that explains why your dreams are filled with the names of the dead.
When you were fifteen your father had bought you a Kodak DC280. You were interested in investigation and in technology and he thought it might be useful for amateur sleuthing. Sayu had monopolized it for about a week, taking pictures of the rooms of the house, of mom and herself and the three of you together and some of those you'd had printed. After that it became yours entirely. When you placed it on your desk you could stare into the lens and see nothing but your own reflection, floating uneasily on the dark.
It was inert, but it was a representation of your own power. When you had, in one of your school clubs, watched Man With a Movie Camera (said camera being in actuality a number of cameras, foremost among them the Debrie Parvo Model L) you had been struck with the uncanny sensation that encompassed both familiarity and strangeness, though you had and have still never been to Odesa, Kiev, Moscow. Life has never been captured more in its accuracy and its arbitrary vitality. Back then, three years ago, life had still felt to you like vitality, and not like rottenness. And so when you had later read Dziga Vertov (Ка́уфман Дави́д А́белевич [Kaufman David Abelevich])'s words, written from the camera's point of view, you had been in a kind of awe:
I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. I am in constant motion. I approach objects and move away from them. I creep up to them. I clamber over them, I move alongside the muzzle of a running horse, I tear into a crowd at full tilt, I flee before fleeing soldiers, I turn over on my back, I rise up with aeroplanes, I fall and rise with falling and rising bodies… …Freed from any obligation to 16-17 frames a second, freed from the restraints of time and space, I juxtapose any points in the universe regardless of where I fixed them. My path leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world.
The camera was waiting for your direction. You had not originally intended to take any pictures of yourself, (Model. Name: Yagami Light. Hardworking honor's student. Soichiro's son) and yet you were struck with a sudden overpowering curiosity to see what it made of you; bursting with a need to see that infiniteness directed towards yourself. To be free from human immobility, from the restraints of time and space, to exist in a new world of your own making. You got up, locked your door, set the timer and waited while it counted down like the rapid-fire pulse of a heart-monitor. The photo you got was blurred, pixelated and in shadow, and there was a strange cast to your face that didn't enhance your beauty in the way that you usually liked; there was nothing in it of the fashion-magazine men you paged through and aspired to be. But there was a secrecy to it; and something in the eyes that stopped your finger on the trash button before you could press down.
You set the timer again and put the camera on your desk. Unbuttoning the collar of your shirt with trembling hands. What am I doing? you thought. Nothing. You are alone, no one will ever see this, no one will ever catch you, and so it doesn't matter. This is an experiment. The camera ticked down and the red light of it segmented every second, and then it beeped. (Shoulderblade. A hasty, untucked smile that does not resemble Yagami Light's at all.)
You set the timer again and put it down. On the edge of your bed, your fingers toyed with the zipper on your pants. You could feel your hardness there still hidden out of the camera's frame, but the heat that had come to your cheeks was like a wanton thing.
Interesting, you'd thought. Looking at other people, even the most beautiful women, had never made you want in any way; the way you wanted now. Perhaps it was because the camera has no will but yours, no body but yours.
You did not own pornography until you were seventeen, when you bought magazines on a whim. The unnatural poses and coy looks did nothing for you. But still, you thought; if anyone wonders about me they will know I'm only an ordinary young man. These pages themselves prove it.
Was it because you had begun to wonder, even then, why Kira's mind so uncannily mirrored your own?
.
.
.