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Death Note: Another Note (Novel)

Death Note: Another Note (Novel)

Written by Aion on 13 Mar 2009

Distributor Viz • Author/Artist Ishin Nishio • Price £9.99


Death Note: Another Note is a light novel that acts a sequel to the main Death Note manga. Narrated by Mello, the book chronicles the original L's fight to solve a mystery in L.A, with the help of Naomi Misora.

The book has a good twist at the end and was an enjoyable read, but it had a few issues. The first was that the author seemingly didn't pay much attention to the manga. I say that because humans cannot work out how long another human has to live based on the numbers they see with Shinigami eyes -- only shinigami themselves can put the numbers together and work out how much life a person has left. The second flaw is a continuation of the first flaw; As well as wrongly explaining how someone with shinigami's eyes can see when someone will die, the author suggested it's easier to kill people who are nearing death, using some sort of foreign logic to inform readers that B.B. could kill people without a struggle for that very reason. I fail to see how someone is easier to kill an hour before they're meant to die naturally as a result of murder or some freak accident?

Another issue I had was with B.B.'s character. One minute he was an insane bad guy, doing the whole evil laughter thing, and the next he was a clone of another, totally different character. And putting aside my annoyance over his copy and paste standard issue insane baddie personalities, I can't quite work out how managed to become a clone of someone who, as far as I'm aware, he never met. If he had met him then he would've known the real name of the person he was copying.

I did, however, enjoy reading the story quite a bit. If I allowed myself to forget what I know about the real Death Note and view it as fan fiction, which is what it is when it comes down to it, I was able to derive a fair amount of enjoyment from the novel. The entire book is basically fan service for Death Note fans, so if you can adjust your expectations accordingly then the experience will be much more enjoyable.

I'm going to re-read it again at some point because of the twist at the end. Although I should've picked up the hints given by the word "misdirection" popping up a lot before the end, I wasn't expecting the author to pull it off in quite the way he did.

8
It plays fast and loose with the original premise, but as an homage to the original, it's good stuff.

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Written by Aion on 13 Mar 2009

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