List of Death Note Characters

This is a list of fictional characters in the manga and anime series Death Note. The character names are listed in Western order, with the given name before the family name.

The writer, Tsugumi Ohba, developed the basic character traits while Takeshi Obata, the artist, created the visual character designs.

In his stories, Ohba chose character names that "seemed real but could not exist in the real world" because most of the characters were criminals and victims.

Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, death, note and/or characters:

    Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.
    Janet Frame (b. 1924)

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
    Mario Puzo (b. 1920)

    What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.
    Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)

    Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)