Light Yagami: A Room of One’s Own

We are stuckin the silence of a room that warms up in the dark. We thinkbecause in this way we can be two even alone. Let’s talkbecause words are wider in the room than in our heads.
Exhausted because immobile, and not immobile because exhausted, we judge the smoothness of the handles and the ruthless geometry of the paintings on the wall with our eyes. One thing is certain: we have never looked at our room like when we found ourselves forced to do it every day, now 3 years ago. That guiding limit that was, is the introduction to the microcosm of Light Yagami, protagonist of Death Note. That reflexive oppression that has led us to recover a more intimate, primitive semantic value to our room: the sense of refuge.

There is a Japanese term that summarizes some stages of Light Yagami’s condition: hikikomori. The term formed by “tail” (pull) and “chamber” (withdraw, withdraw), represents an extremely widespread psychological and social phenomenon in Japan, which consists inevasion – physics in the specific case, although not properly attributable to the protagonist of Death Note, but we will get there – from social life, in the isolation induced by the rigid culture of self-realization to which one has been subjected since childhood in Japan. A sort of rebellion of Japanese youth against traditional culture.

And hikikomori more closely matching the definition is no doubt Lbut Light Yagami’s need in his search for a spiritual refuge is one of the closest psychosomatizations to alienation that the entire plot offers us, and which reveals a phasic course disorder (the suddenness of state at the end of the anime, during Kira’s delirious and chilling final monologue, is one example).
A room of one’s own: this is the space that he allowed himself, alone, while he writes about death and talks about life, the ideal one, telling the world that is so easy to say that you can comfortably enter his room. And then yes, that space may even be enough.

The refuge for Light is one need. He becomes so when his nemesis L corners him in a harp-stringed nerve contest that has few equals in television history. Yet over time, without Light himself realizing it, that need will become a comfort. That place that soundproofed intentions ends up amplifying them, now that the room is set up as a perfect microcosm, where every piece is the necessary virtue of those who don’t need the world if they have another in their pocket. Light Yagami’s sociopathy in Death Note goes hand in hand with his need to isolate himself, and it is evident how this need is portrayed with a growing manifestation, a saturating progression. One in which the concept of “ideal refuge” plays a key role.

The delusion of omnipotence of the protagonist of Death Note is directly proportional to the control over the comfort zone that surrounds him. In this regard, once again, the example of the psychological breakdown and loss of control in the finale is useful, when the narrow and rough walls of his room gave way to the wide and slippery walls of the warehouse in which the God of the new world has lost its secure borders of its rules.
In that room of his own, Kira felt embraced by the oppression of expectations (those that apparently are of himself and that’s it, but that intimately have a lot in common with the figure of the hikikomori), seraphically undergoing the slight, constant but controllable pain of imprisonment which is less dangerous than uncontrollable freedom. In the apathy of that diabolical control, the “Light boy” slowly faded away, and we will only see him again as he pleads for humanity to himself, in the final race to the gallows before Ryuk writes his name in the notebook. There, while he wonders desperately where all the people once dear to him have gone, almost forgetting the inhumanities he committed, we see the Light Yagami that could have been.

In the melancholy timing of the irreparablein the future that will never be, there is that Death Note message that goes beyond free will, the concept of justice and religion.
There is everything that was beyond the walls of that room to himself, which is worth more than a black spot in the northeast that portrays red in the southwest. More than the diabolical corrupt determinism traced by ink. The one protected by a pen played in italics by a boy dressed as a judge. The one contained in one stanza.

A room so large as to contain destiny, but so small as to crush the mind.
The one all for himself, where Light Yagami learned to count only up to one.