What is Death Note Another Note?

Another Note was published by Shueisha in August 2006, while the manga was still completing its run, written by Nisio Isin, already a rising name in Japanese light and literary fiction, with Obata providing illustrations. It is a prequel set before the Kira case: in Los Angeles, a killer stages locked room murders with wara ningyo straw dolls left at the scenes, and Naomi Misora, sidelined from the FBI, is recruited by L through laptop screens to work the case.

The novel's narrator is its cleverest device: Mello tells the story from after the main series' events, framing the book as his record of a case L once described to him, which lets a prequel carry the voice and the spoilers of the finished manga. The killer, Beyond Birthday, a would be successor from Wammy's House obsessed with outdoing L, became one of the most discussed characters never to appear in the manga itself.

Nisio Isin's prose made the book a literary event in its own right: his wordplay, chapter architecture and narrator games sit visibly on top of Ohba's world, and the novel is routinely treated by fans as essential rather than as merchandise, the standard against which Death Note's other prose, the L: Change the WorLd film novelization, is measured.

VIZ Media published the English translation in 2008 in a hardcover edition, making Another Note one of the earlier Japanese light novel style releases to receive a serious Western hardcover in the manga boom's late years. Japanese and English editions differ in format and furniture, and the Japanese original's design, a white, notebook conscious object, is the more deliberate piece of bookmaking.

For the shelf, Another Note is the expansion that worked: it deepened L's past, gave Naomi Misora her own case, and proved the series' world could sustain prose. It belongs between the manga volumes and How to Read in any complete Death Note collection, the story volume the numbering never gave a number.