What is Death Note 13: How to Read?

Death Note 13: How to Read was published by Shueisha on October 13, 2006, months after the manga ended, as the series' official guidebook: character biographies for the entire cast, the complete Shinigami file, storyline summaries, the full rules of the notebook reorganized by subject, and long interviews in which Ohba and Obata explain how the series was made. Its Japanese title runs the other way around, How to Read 13, with the kanji for truth worked into the design; Viz's English edition, published February 19, 2008, flipped the title to match the shelf. It also reprints, in full, the 2003 pilot chapter, the Taro Kagami one-shot that exists in no other collected volume.

The book's most famous physical feature is a card. Bound into the volume is a character card that reveals L's true name, the single most guarded fact in the series, printed nowhere in the twelve manga volumes themselves. For collectors that card is the point of the object: a How to Read with its card intact and present is the complete artifact, and the card is the first thing to check in any copy, Japanese or English. The Japanese limited edition went further, bundling five finger puppets of Kira, L, Misa, Near, and Mello, the toys Near plays with in the story, made real.

One identification trap lives in the English edition, and it is a gift for careful buyers: Viz botched the character height conversions. The Japanese data gives heights in centimeters; the English edition converted them wrongly, shaving inches off the cast, listing Light at 5 foot 8 against his correct 179 centimeters, about 5 foot 10 and a half. A page of wrong numbers in an official book is exactly the kind of flaw that identifies an edition at a glance. Between the pilot chapter, the name card, and the interviews, How to Read is the rare guidebook that is not merchandise about the series. It is part of the series, numbered thirteen by its own publisher.