The manga Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba follows college student Light Yagami as he navigates through the hardest, yet most exciting years of his life.
Light Yagami is a senior in high school when the manga starts; he has perfect grades, perfect attendance, and is probably the smartest kid in Japan. One day when he’s sitting in class, bored, he sees a notebook falling from the sky outside. After class, Light finds the book outside. It’s thin, black, and has two words written on the cover: Death Note.
Not long after, Light meets Ryuk the Shinigami, the owner of the notebook. The Shinigami are Gods of Death, and he informs Light that if he writes someone’s name in the book while picturing their face, they will die.
It doesn’t take long for the genius to become psychotic with this new power. He draws the attention of international police, bringing the anonymous detective who goes by the name L into the Kanto region. L, having no true name or face, is the smartest detective in the world. He takes the cases that no one else can figure out… and solves it.
Light is now known internationally as Kira, who plans to rid the world of violence and become God of his new world. He kills off as many criminals as possible, no matter how minimal their crimes are. The Japanese Police Force and L are running in circles trying to catch Kira, who happens to be right in front of them.
Light’s father is the Chief of police, and helping the Kira Task Force (run by L), so Light is able to get insider information to help avoid police suspicion.
This doesn’t last long, though, because Light is recruited to the Task Force at the same time that he becomes L’s number one suspect.
Years pass with Light and L working together to hunt down Kira, and the story ends heartbreakingly. L is murdered by a Shinigami named Rem, Light is killed by the Task Force, and Light’s girlfriend, Misa, who knew he was Kira and was helping him kill, kills herself by jumping off of a bridge at sunset.
L spent the final years of his life hunting down his best friend, and he never got to know that it was really him all along.
Light wasted those years trying to become a God, even though Ryuk had told him, “Humans haunted by Shinigami usually have nothing but misfortune.”
Misa wasted those years fawning over Light, begging him to love her, when the entire time he was using her for his own personal gain- the only thing that prevented Light from killing her was the threat from Misa’s Shinigami, who told him that if Misa got hurt in any way, she would kill Light.
This manga is over two thousand pages long, so obviously I didn’t go into immersive detail with the summary, but it is truly a work of art.