Is the Death Note pilot one-shot the same story as chapter one?

The pilot chapter of Death Note ran in Weekly Shonen Jump issue No.36, 2003, four months before the series began, and it is not an early draft of chapter one so much as an alternate universe with the same props. Its finder is not Light Yagami but Taro Kagami, a bullied thirteen year old who picks up the notebook, cannot read the English word death, and assumes the book is a diary. He writes in it the way a diary invites: complaining about the classmates who torment him. Then the classmates die, and Taro, who never wanted anyone dead, spends the rest of the chapter trying to undo it.

The undoing is literal. Ryuk gives Taro the Death Eraser: erase a name from the notebook and the victim returns to life, provided the body has not been cremated. That single object inverts the whole series. In the serialized manga, a written name is forever; in the pilot, death is a pencil mistake. The pilot's notebook is limited in other ways the series abandoned: it has 60 pages of 38 lines, and when you run out, you may ask the shinigami for another. The finished series states flatly that the pages never run out. The pilot also ends warmly, with confessions, resurrections, and a seven year jump to a Taro who still quietly owns his notebook.

Nothing of Taro's story is canon, and the creators knew what they had discarded: in the guidebook Death Note 13: How to Read, where the pilot is reprinted in full, Ohba records that the Death Eraser idea was not liked and did not survive. Read the pilot to see the road not taken: Death Note as a fable about regret, before it became a war between two geniuses with no eraser in sight.