Death Note | Week 7 Discussion

Chapter 6 - 操作

Start Date: March 5th
Previous Week: Chapter 5
Next Week: Chapter 7

frDGCemG5kX9EBY8IrbThQ__

Death Note Home Thread



Vocabulary List

Please read the editing guidelines in the first sheet before adding any words!


Discussion Guidelines

  • Please blur out major events in the current week’s pages, and any content from later in the book/series, like this: [spoiler]texthere[/spoiler]

  • When asking for help, please mention the page number (or % for eBooks).

  • To you lurkers out there: join the conversation, it’s fun!


Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll:

  • I’m reading along
  • I’m planning to catch up later
  • I’m skipping this book

0 voters

If you’ve read it before but will join in the discussion (or have read ahead), please select “I’m reading along”!


3 Likes

Seeing Light toy both with L and the lives of criminals, moves him firmly from “righteous villain” into “psychopathic killer” territory. He’s already a far way from those first chapters of this story, when he was in somewhat shock about the Death Note actually able to kill people. Now he’s enjoying the process.

9 Likes

Yup! It also seems that in this chapter Raito is clearly in control and L is left figuring things out and being もし〜としたら uncertain about stuff.

Any interesting and/or confusing grammar or expressions in this chapter?

6 Likes

Definitely, power corrupts. He started out with a “righteous goal”, even if it was through killing. Now he thinks the ends justifies the means. He fell the moment he killed the supposedly good guy Lind L. Tailor. He was presented as a detective, not a criminal. But Light didn’t mind killing him just for investigating him.

6 Likes

Is it normal for Light to see his father’s computer? Even so, would a police take his work home? Of course, it isn’t in the news either.

1 Like

No it’s not. Light has hacked into his father’s work computer. It’s not that Soichiro takes his work home, it’s that the computer has secure connections to the police databases. We know this, since when Light is testing the extent of control he can have over other people, and he can immediately see the “results” of these trials, even when his father is at work. :eyes:

4 Likes

Page 159, Light already had an Excel file of prisoners, but how? Is it really mentioned somewhere when and how he got access to police department data?

1 Like

it’s on page 166 that Light hacks into his fathers computer. On page 159, Light explains to Ryuku that he has a “stockpile” of criminals he’s already looked up to use. That compilation of data/research can be done in any number of ways, news reports etc. :woman_shrugging:

2 Likes

Check page 116. There it’s first mentioned and from there on it becomes an important part of the plot line :slight_smile:

4 Likes

I kept being half a week behind for the last couple of weeks or so, but I finally caught up.

Light’s megalomania is ever growing. Why does he want his follower’s name? Is he going to kill him just for doing his job? And wouldn’t that draw attention to him even more?

Page 155, first panel: Is it ガンガンつつこんでくる or ガンガンつっこんでくる? And what exactly does it mean?

I’d like some help with the suicide note. I’m bad at reading handwriting, and reading all kana. Is what I typed here correct? かんがえるといずれしけいになるかてまねきしているあいつにころされるだけだ。しっている。おれはキラのそんざいを。えものにされる。And would the first sentence mean “If you think about it I’ll either eventually get the death penalty or get killed by the one who’s beckoning?”
I’m also idly wondering how he manipulated the formatting of the suicide note through the death note so that it spells out a message for L.

4 Likes

It’s explained that the criminals replicates the message just like he wrote it in the Death Note. that goes both for the picture and the text, so I guess, formatting is also possible - within the same parameters of reasonable behavior, i.e. that it’s not too unnatural for a person to perform. :thinking: Vertical writing is normal writing, so I guess, it’s fine.

4 Likes

ガンガン - here: throbbing, pounding
I can’t really find つつこむ in a dictionary, but I think the entire phrase means that Ryuk is getting nervous of the way Raito is - almost like a shinigami, but not really one.

Searching for "ガンガンつつこんで’ brings up only a question about this exact sentence on Hinative, whereas searching for ガンガンつっこんで brings up lots of results, which is why I’m thinking this may be a case of a small っ looking bigger than it should. 突っ込む has quite a lot of meanings, one of which is to press (someone) about; to point out (e.g. an inconsistency); to question sharply; to grill, which is exactly what Light had just been doing. The way I understand the whole sentence is roughly “Even though I am a shinigami, without fearing me or flattering me even a little he ガンガン grills me on this matter”

Sure, it’s just that it wasn’t shown and I wondered how it would look - in the notebook he writes horizontally and left to right, and the text of the suicide note needed to be vertical and right to left. It was just an idle thought, nothing important to dwell on.

4 Likes

Yeah it’s the second one, so ガンガン + 突っ込む + conjugation. The small っ comes from the stem of 突く being 突き with 込む forming a new compound verb. Here it adds the meaning of putting something/someone into something on the verb:

https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/込む1

Lots of onomatopoetic words are used for extra flavor, here I’m looking at the colloquial use of ガンガン , which adds the meaning of hard, fully or vigorously.

So you can translate that as presses hard for example, but there’s maybe a dozen combinations that might work just as well or even better.

6 Likes

Is one of those onomatopoetic expressions that’s used as an amplifier to a statement.

Basically, Light was just on the previous page reacting to Ryuk by giving him a verbal lashing for being late about telling him those important things. He’s really giving Ryuk a hard time about it, and so Ryuk is reflecting on that: The fact that Light isn’t scared at all at Ryuku, even as he’s a shinigami, but rather, he just keeps giving Ryuk a hard time about stuff like this.

I’ve heard ガンガン in other statements before. But, it’s kind of hard to give an exact translation to something like this. I would have said “keeps on going on and on” from that other context, but that conversation was completely different. But “giving a hard time”, kind of works well here I felt.

5 Likes

It matches with how I read it and I can’t think of a better translation than yours :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Thanks for confirming my suspicion. Can we just take a moment to appreciate the size difference between つ and っ. In this (very magnified) image I copied the っ and pasted it in red over the つ . I knew that in Japanese context is everything, but it seems it’s true even for individual letters. The only reason to think this is a small っ is context (and a few pixels).
image

6 Likes

My bad in this case. I would definitely fail the “spot the difference” with stuff like that :joy:

3 Likes

Brilliant! I’ve noticed that Manga often use a font in which the small っ seems the same as the big つ, but your image very effectively teaches us two shocking things about this:

  1. That the difference really is so small that it is invisible to the human eye.
  2. But that there is a difference nonetheless.

So that means some font designer went through the trouble of designing two separate characters that are indistinguishable for the readers!

:joy:

5 Likes
Page 154, Panel 1

Please check my work.

Ryuk says 「こういう話は早くしておかないと後で文句言われても嫌だからな」which Light quotes in the second panel.

こういう話・早く・おく・ない・と
This sort of thing / early / in advance / not / if

Roughly: “Because I’d hate to be complained to after this if I don’t tell (you) this sort of thing early in advance.” Which Light than quotes as “if I don’t tell (you) this sort of thing early in advance.”

Page 154, Panel 5

Please help me break this down.

Light says「そんな話は会ってすぐにいうか」

  1. 会ってすぐに seems to mean “immediately after meeting.” But this event has already finished, so why not use the past tense of 会う? I’m not familiar with how すぐに works.
  2. Is か a sentence-final か marking a question at the end of a sentence or a sentence-internal か marking a question within a larger clause?

Light finishes with じゃないか so I think he means roughly “Shouldn’t you have written that in the instructions or mentioned it when we first met?” That is, じゃないか applies to both of Light’s questions. I’m leaning toward it all being one sentence.

I think I’m there but something about the underlying structure is not quite clicking.

Page 165, Panel 4

…絶対に許せん
I believe this to be roughly “this is absolutely unforgivable.”

許す・~せる・ん
to forgive / potential form / negation (of some kind?)

Something about せん is throwing me off.

Question on Symbols

I notice when I hit the [ / ] key I get either [ / ] in English or [・] in Japanese. While typing my questions I started wondering, what exactly is [・]? Are these symbols equivalent?

So that means some font designer went through the trouble of designing two separate characters that are indistinguishable for the readers!

And I’m sure he was well paid! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes