Book Review; Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles B.B. Murder Cases by Nisio Isin

For those of you who are not familiar with Japanese animation, or for those who are, yet have been trapped in the wilderness for several years, the series Death Note is an critically acclaimed anime/manga that tells of the mental struggle between L, the world’s foremost detective, and Yagami Light, a high school genius who happens to stumble across a supernatural notebook that allows him to kill anyone by simply writing their name. Light decides to use the book as a tool to rid the world of suffering and ascend as a new God of Justice. Using the note, he lays waste to the prison population, killing hundreds of people in a few days. All of them die of seemingly causeless heart attacks. L, a faceless and nameless super detective takes up the case and swears to capture Kira (a bastardization of the Anglo “Killer”). L shows his face for the first time and swears to bring Kira down. Light kills him on the spot. The real L then appears and reveals that it was all an elaborate trap and then deduces (although I think he may have really be inducing, I don’t know) the provence of Japan where Kira lives with stunning accuracy. This begins what may be the best 19 hour head game you will have the pleasure of watching (strange part in the middle non-withstanding).

Unfortunately, what I plan to talk about has almost NOTHING to do with all of that.

Now, what started as a supernatural detective story in a popular japanese boy’s comic magazine has blossomed into an international multi-media empire spanning 12 manga books, a 34 episode anime, two horrible live action movies, a whole series of action figures, and a book. I shan’t concern myself with anything at this moment but the book. The rest shall come at a later date. The story of how I got the book is interesting in itself. My best friend’s ex-girlfriend bought it, read it, gave it to my best friend who read it, went out, bought a copy, gave his ex-girlfriend’s copy to another friend who then in turn read it and somewhere along the line someone’s copy ended up in my possession. So I read it. In a single day. 

It was very short.

Now, as a matter of judgement good fiction prose should be gripping prose. A book that draws you face first into its world. It is the sign of a true artist of the word when the line between book and reality wavers and the reader becomes just as much of a living, breathing part of the world of the story as the characters who struggle to make their way in a world as real as our own. That is the sign of a good writer of fiction! Now, not all stories are required to be so totally immersive to be good. Some stories, such as Animal Farm, can get away with floating at the top of one’s mind where one can pick and play with it (as such an allegorical tale should be). Some stories, such as Paradise Lost, can be incredibly well written, but not gripping.

The a primary problem with Another Note is that it draws you in, but then kind of leaves you hanging somewhere to the left. You don’t really integrate with that reality. Your kind of left, floating, simply reading words off of a page. There was very little internal visualization. Scenes, when imagined, did not flow, and the characters all seemed to move without any real reason or transition. I blame this on the stale writing.

The story itself centers not on any real bit of the Death Note plot at all, but on a case L and a secondary character from early in the series undertook years before. Namely the L.A. B.B. murder cases. The secondary character was sharp lion of a woman named Naomi Misora, an F.B.I. agent who nearly had Kira pinned early in the series. She makes a mistake and Light kills her in what may be the most jaw dropping rage-inducing scene in anime history. Nothing makes you hate Light more than what he does to Naomi.

The character we get in the book is a timid cypher who has no driving philosophy or convictions and who doubts herself and has been suspended from the F.B.I. because she couldn’t shoot a thirteen-year old murdering drug smuggler. Yes. thirteen-year old murdering drug smuggler. She has no real reason to not have shot the kid beyond a poorly defined fear and the sense that fate is grinding her into nothing. Which seems to be a huge part of the plot. She has no real control over her surroundings, she’s constantly being manipulated by either L. or B.B.. Which is sad, because she is the most active character of the three.

The story centers around several strange serial murder cases. L, through Naomi, has to solve them and defeat the murder B.B., who in reality is a protege of the man who found L. B.B., or simple B, was trained in hopes of replacing L should L ever die. B wants to surpass L by creating a series of crimes that are unsolvable. B can also see when people will die, and this fact has driven him a little crazy. There is actually a reason for this. When a person obtains a Death Note they can make a bargain with the Note’s owner, a shinigami (death god), to trade half their life for a pair of eyes that can tell the name of the person and when they will die. Now, why B has shinigami eyes… its never explained. The narrator (another of L’s backups) does not even try. In the end, this information had little to do with the plot or characters at all. In fact, the entire story would have made a vast amount more sense had this detail been axed.

Now the story goes on while Naomi and a private detective named Rue Ryuzaki go from scene to scene finding clues and working out hidden messages left by the killer. They manage to figure out some very bizarre logic jumps and figure out when and where the fourth and final murder will take place. The sad thing is that a decently intelligent reader can figure out half the conclusions ahead of time, which does not add to the fun of the book. The other half the time, you can’t because the logic is almost completely divorced from reality. Some of the strange logic games B.B. sets up for his puzzles makes quantum mechanics look sensible.

Now, the final deductive logical mind warp of a conclusion is completely unexpected, but not surprising. It is unexpected in the manner of “Wait, where did all of this information come from?” The data that precedes the conclusion is not covered in any meaningful way in any previous page. Its there, if one were to look it over the book with as hard an eye as the detectives, but for those of us who just read the book, the conclusion seems to magically step into the narrative, fully formed, made up of horribly obscure facts and logically warped turns of phrase. 

In the end Naomi single handedly solves the case and stops B from constructing an unsolvable crime. She returns to the F.B.I. with much glamour and praise and somewhere in the intervening years she grows a personality.

In the end, the narration was sub-par. The characters weren’t just flat, they where one dimensional, and most lacked in anything resembling a personality beyond an assorted handful of psychological quirks. The plot, was very unfulfilling and filled with logic almost divorced from reality. Now, while this is not a horrible book in any manner, its overwhelming mediocrity makes every unfulfilled promise and flaw seem so much worse. It was probably not helped that the book was very hyped by all of my friends. In the end, if your were ever curious as to what it would look like if B.F. Skinner wrote a prequel to an critically acclaimed anime/manga series, now is your chance.

Final Rating; 1.5 out of 5

~ by Michael on June 28, 2008.