2020 Death Note's Deeper Meaning
The story of the original Death Note ends with Near's defeat of Light Yagami. But the very last image the manga leaves us with is of a cloaked female hierophant holding vigil for his return. The message is unavoidable: Kira is dead; his vision is not.
The 2020 one-shot manga has left many fans bemused. They are outraged by the unfair fate of Minoru Tanaka. And the piece overall can feel pretty uncharacteristic of Death Note. Why does Donald Trump appear as the president when in the original narrative the American president was a generic fictional character? Why does Near seem so apathetic?
One of the first things we are given in the latest manga is an explanation of how Kira has been received by the mainstream of the contemporary world. We are told he is taught as being the worst terroristic murderer of the modern world in the schools' ethics and world history classes, raising parallels with the treatment of the dictators of the early 20th century in our reality. In other words: at the outset of this story, Hitler is immediately evoked in the reader's mind.
Why does Near not successfully identify who he calls "A-Kira" or at least even make more of a spirited effort to? If the original L had been on the case it is likely that he would have immediately realized that Ryuk would be likely to seek out a top test scoring student again, and from there, would be able to deduce it down to A-Kira's identity using only info provided in the story. It is possible that Near also comes to this realization himself. It is not that Near cannot solve this case, but that he is not interested in solving it. This is largely because this new notebook holder is not actually committing crimes. But even more to the point: we find Near this time not in the role of a detective trying to solve an individual case but as someone starting from the very essence of the issue and trying to end the whole possibility of the Kira phenomenon from ever resurging entirely.
When we first find Near in this new story he is, true to the artist-engineer he is at heart, trying to invent a device for the detection of Shinigami when they enter the human realm. Much like how the original L saw there was not much point in saving a few lives if it meant that Kira was not stopped by doing so, Near is concerned with bypassing relatively harmless new temporal incarnations of the Kira phenomenon and focusing on stopping the phenomenon's potential altogether. And his artistic-mechanical reconstruction of Ryuk is the only type of solution which would potentially be able to prevent new Kiras from existing entirely. He eventually realizes the futility of this endeavor though and explodes his device in what I find to be the most bleak moment of an altogether bleak story.
It seems that Near (and Tsugumi Ohba, as well) comes to understand that there is an inevitability to the Kira phenomenon and its ever-present possibility of returning. People wonder what the "point" of this one-shot manga even is. It seems pretty straightforward to me. Tsugumi Ohba seems to have been looking around at modern times and thinking about how once a Hitlerian vision has been unleashed on the world, it does not much matter if the individual actors were defeated. There is always the potential that someday, someone new can take it up again. In our last piece we asked if Near's victory over Kira was absolute. In 2020, Ohba came back to the world stage to give you the answer.
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