Death Note

DEATH NOTE
I didn't think there was enough information in the series to write it for my paper but I wanted to talk about it because I felt it fit the class.

One of the books I was reading was the manga Death Note. And I found its idea of utopia an interesting, if overly simplistic idea.
 For Those of you who are not familiar with the series Death Note is an anime/manga about a High School student named Light Yagami who discovers a notebook with the words Death Note written on it. On the inside it claims that if you write a person's name and think of their face they will die.

The Rules of the Death Note

 Light is skeptical but decides to try it out on a criminal holding a bunch of kids hostage. To his surprise the Death Note works. He tests it again to double check and again it works. He freaks out realizing that he killed people but gets over it rather quickly deciding that they did deserve to die and he was going to make the world a better place by killing all criminals in the world

And that is the goal of Light Yamagi for the rest of the story. (Besides making even the most mundane action completely over the top)

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However people obviously oppose his actions in killing criminals without a trial or anything similar and they attempt to arrest. This ends up being the main plot of the story where a famous detective known as L tries to discover how the killer (known as Kira in public) is doing the killings and prove his real identity while Light is trying to discover L's real name and face so he can kill him.

What makes this relevant to a Utopia class though is Light's goals. He is actively trying to create a Utopia. And this is interesting because we usually don't see this side of utopias. We either see the hypothetical of how a utopia should be created, or we join one once its already been created. So just seeing it from the creative perspective is interesting.
Further Death Note idea to get rid of bad stuff is simply to kill off all people who commit crimes. This is a somewhat interesting perspective because on one hand you are getting rid of all the people who would hurt others. Most people would not disagree that getting rid of, at least the most violent serial killers, would not be a negative thing. And the novel explores both sides of this idea. On one hand with Light's actions crime goes down substantially, getting to the point where criminals are very rare and do whatever possible to hide their identities. On the other hand the world is not shown as becoming a positive world because of it but still rather darker and more negative as the show goes on. I don't agree myself with this utopia because I see problems where simply killing off criminals would not solve but I believe that some people would think this way. And this is what makes the story interesting.
And at times when Kira disappears the crime rate goes back up again showing that the people were not really changed, but simply afraid to commit crimes. The minute they get a chance to do so they immediately start committing crimes again.
Its a creepy idea and it makes the story itself quite interesting (which is more focused on the mind game between L and Light)

I recommend it both as an interesting read if you like mind games and as an interesting idea of a rather simplistic utopia.