What is Death Note Short Stories?

Published in Japan in February 2021 and by VIZ in English in 2022, Short Stories exists because Death Note's short works had scattered across a decade and a half of magazines, bonus booklets and the back of How to Read. The volume gathers them as a single reading object: the post series one shots about later notebook users, the pilot that started everything, and the lighter L material that shows Ohba and Obata playing in their own world.

The pilot chapter is the volume's historical core: published in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2003 as the series' proof of concept, it stars Taro Kagami, a schoolboy unlike Light in nearly every way, and introduces the Death Note, Ryuk and even an eraser that can undo deaths, a device the series dropped. Read beside chapter one, on the pilot's own page in this shelf, it documents how much of the finished work was present at the first attempt and how much was sharpened away.

The one shots frame the series from after its ending: the C-Kira story, drawn for the post series Jump specials, gives the notebook to a user who cannot carry Light's ambition, and the a-Kira story, the 2020 special one shot with its own page in this shelf, tests the notebook against the modern world's cameras and a rule the shinigami king adds for the occasion. Together they are Ohba and Obata's controlled experiments in what their premise means decades on.

The L material, the short pieces gathered from magazine extras including the Wammy's House flavored stories and the four panel humor, rounds out a volume that is part archive and part reunion. It is the only Death Note manga book where the tone is allowed to be fond.

For collectors, Short Stories is mandatory in a way later epilogues rarely are: it is the single volume that completes the manga record, and shelving it after How to Read closes the set that the volumes page in this shelf defines. Japanese and English editions mirror each other closely, continuing the standard editions' fidelity pattern.