Mu

Death Note, Volume 12, page 188, has these two rules in regards to "Mu": "All humans will, without exception, eventually die." This is immediately followed by, "After they die, the place they go is MU (Nothingness)."


 * English: After they die, the place they go is MU (Nothingness).
 * Japanese: 死んだ後にいくところ、無である.

These rules can be applied to both humans in general and humans who have used a Death Note.

The general implication of Mu is that all humans, regardless of their actions during life, simply cease to exist upon dying and are equal in death.

Mu is a Japanese and Korean word which denotes a negative: the absence of something. In Zen Buddhism, "Mu" is the answer given to an improperly phrased question that does not merit an answer.

The Japanese reads more like "after death, the place they go; it's Mu," and in Zen Buddhism, "mu is an answer to a question that depends on invalid axioms." When the rule states "the place they go; it's Mu," it means the question relies on an invalid assumption. They don't go anywhere because there is nowhere for them to go to.

Tsugumi Ohba, the author of Death Note, was influenced by Buddhism; this is why the series has 108 chapters. This matches up with various things Ohba says about life after death in Death Note 13: How to Read:


 * For me, one of the premises of the series is that once a person died, they could never come back to life. I really wanted to set a rule that bringing characters back to life is cheating. That's why death equals "nothingness" … If I had to choose [a theme to express throughout the series], I'd say "Humans will all eventually die and never come back to life, so let's give it our all while we're alive".

Death equals "nothingness" だから、”無”なんです--"so, it's Mu."