Anyway aside from the horror I felt when I realized that I’d wrongly labeled someone an alcoholic based on a misattributed wikipedia article, I enjoyed this post. Now that the conspiracy-theorist rush of discovery has worn off, I’m not sure whether I still believe that Ohba picked up the idea of a short story/manga pilot about a killing notebook from Now: Zero, in particular. Morally, the stories are very different. (Morally, some people would argue, Death Note is an utter vacuum, even compared to other Japanese manga.) But I’m not sure that a claim of direct inspiration is that far-fetched, either. The notebook in Death Note does feel like a “found” device, rather than an invented or intuited device: it drives the story, but not in a way that has anything to do with the story’s underlying themes. (Which are what, I wonder? Intellectual competition as one-upsmanship? Model students effortlessly becoming sociopathic mass murderers? Flashy car chase scenes? The hollowness of modern existence, such that the FORM, the appearance of the thing, is enough, and it hardly matters that there is actually no substance to it? Hmmm.)

Minor nitpick: the schoolkid in the pilot chapter is male, not female. You can tell because his name is “Taro,” a stereotypically generic Japanese boy name, like “Dick” in English.