Dream with Our Eyes Open

Ever since I started Death Note, people have been warning me that the plot takes a radical twist at one point and becomes a different story. Well, this (specifically volume 7) is that point.

The search for Kira - who may, of course, be more than one person - continues, as does the touchy cooperative relationship between brilliant college freshman Light Yagami and the eccentric but equally intelligent investigator who calls himself L. The overly cute, tremendously naive young actress Misa Amane, now hopelessly in love with Light, agrees to help with the investigation, and soon one Kira is cornered. But it turns out that Light's plans were much more involved and far-reaching than anyone else could have imagined -- and things proceed exactly as he had planned.

The world may never be the same.

Death Note is the second manga series that I started at the recommendation of Sanada (the first was Saiyuki ... thank you thank you, Sanada-san!!!). She also warned me that Death Note wasn't likely to appeal to me the way that Samurai Deeper Kyo or Saiyuki had, and she was 100% right. The series is worth reading, but this is an affair of the head, not the heart.

Light Yagami, a high school student who is just finishing his final year, is academically brilliant, socially charming ... and bored by life and by his fellow human beings. One day he finds a mysterious notebook inscribed with instructions that will allow its owner to use it to kill people. Light assumes that this is some kind of joke, but he can't resist experimenting with the Death Note, using the names of a couple of criminals - who die, just as the instructions promised. Light quickly decides that he will make the world a better place by killing off criminals. But this is the 21st century, and his actions don't go unnoticed. Soon he's playing cat-and-mouse with the police and with a brilliant criminologist known only as L - but who's the cat, and who's the mouse?