Naomi Misora

"He's dead. Raye's dead. No, he was murdered by Kira."

- Naomi Misora ("Tactics")

Naomi Misora (南空ナオミ, Misora Naomi) is a former FBI agent and the fiancée of agent Raye Penber. After Kira kills Raye and the other twelve FBI agents assisting L with his investigation in Japan, Naomi begins her own investigation.

Appearance
Naomi is an attractive young woman with long black hair and hazel eyes. She is often seen wearing black leather clothes.

Character
Described by Death Note 13: How to Read as formerly a "first rate" FBI agent with "remarkable investigative ability," Naomi left the Bureau in October 2003 for the sake of starting a family in the United States. Naomi is very intelligent. Unfortunately, she eventually lets her feelings get in the way of her investigative abilities.

History
Naomi was previously an FBI agent, and she had assisted L on the LABB case. She quit the FBI in anticipation of her marriage prior to the start of the series.

Plot
After the bus jacking, Raye Penber returns home and is welcomed by his fiancée, Naomi. Penber informs her that he was caught in a bus jacking and that the busjacker was the same man who had hit a bank two days prior. He tells Naomi not to involve herself in the investigation for her own safety. After the sudden death of her fiancé a few days later, which she blames Kira for, Naomi decides to take part in the Kira case herself. Having been told by Raye that he showed his FBI badge to someone during a bus jacking, Naomi deduces that Kira must have been on the bus. In her attempts to contact the Task Force, she comes across Light Yagami. Light uses his father's status to his advantage, telling Naomi that he is Chief Yagami's son, and he slowly begins to win her trust. Cautious at first, she uses the false name Shoko Maki in order to protect herself until she can reach L. Light finally gets Naomi to reveal her name by saying that he is a member of the Task Force and is actually working with L.

Taking advantage of Naomi's emotional state, Light gives the possibility that she could join the Task Force and help catch her fiancé's murderer.

Light says that he will need to see a form of identification before she can join, and Naomi shows him her driver's license. Using a piece of the Death Note, Light writes down Naomi's name. When she asks him why he keeps looking at his watch, Light hesitates and then replies that he does that because he is Kira. Naomi is shocked and then realizes that Light controlled her to kill herself. She slowly walks away from Light, and when he asks her if she wants to speak to his father, Naomi refuses. Light sees her walking towards the road, and the scene switches to show her walking upstairs where there is a dangling rope at the top, implying she commits suicide by hanging herself. Her body is never found due to the specifications made by Light in the Death Note.

Films

 * Main article: Death Note (2006 film) and L: Change the WorLd

In the live-action films, Naomi is portrayed by Asaka Seto and voiced in the dub by Nicole Oliver, rather than Tabitha St. Germain. The character is generally the same in the manga, but she plays a larger role in the story.

Unlike in the Anime and Manga when Ray goes into control from the Death Note into going on the train, Naomi follows him after noticing his suspicious activity, she watches him as he writes the names of the 11 FBI Agents on the Death Note scraps. After Ray gets off the train, Naomi confronts him, only for him to die of a heart attack, and so she helplessly watches him die in her arms crying.

After witnessing her fiancé Ray Iwamatsu die at the hands of Kira, an enraged Naomi begins investigating the case herself. Like in the Anime and Manga she speaks to the bus driver of the busjacking Ray was on, however, in this version the driver remembers Light Yagami, leading him to become Naomi's prime suspect. Under the alias Shoko Maki, she first approaches Light's girlfriend Shiori Akino to get to him, and she confronts him directly with her accusations, Light attempts to kill her with the Death Note but it becomes futile when she reveals to him that she gave him a false name and also informs him that she was Ray's fiancé. She later kidnaps Shiori and holds her at gunpoint to try to get Light to confess on camera for L, but this is later revealed to be just as Light wrote in the Death Note. Her real name was previously uncovered by Light through the wedding documents held by the church where she and Ray had planned to marry. During the kidnapping, Shiori attempts to get away, and Naomi shoots and kills her, which is actually another death orchestrated by Light. Horrified that she's done this, and controlled by the Death Note, Naomi commits suicide by shooting herself in the head.

For the production and filming of the movie, Seto stated that she "tried to project that awesome spirit" of Naomi, referring to the character's tenacity and drive while trying to defeat Kira.

Her character also makes a brief appearance in L: Change the WorLd. Just before L takes the Kira case, Naomi is on a case with L and Ray in America. It's her second assignment with L after the LABB case. She walks into a building, shots are fired, and she emerges unharmed and winks at a surveillance camera for L. Watari comments that L must trust her to work with her again. At this time, she already plans on quitting the FBI to get married.

Novel
Naomi is one of the central characters and heroine in the spinoff novel Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases by author Nisio Isin. The story is set several years prior to the start of Death Note and focuses on a series of murder cases investigated by L with Naomi as his operative. The resulting capture of the murderer helped launch Naomi's reputation within the FBI.

Television drama
In the television drama, the character Shoko Himura is an amalgamation of several characters including Naomi Misora, Halle Lidner, and Mello. The name "Shoko" is from the alias Naomi uses in the manga series, and Shoko worked with the FBI and with L prior to the series, just as Naomi did.

Raye Penber's fiance is instead Cathy Cambell, who only appears in a photograph.

Conception
Naomi's character was originally intended to have a larger role in the storyline which included investigating possible suspects for the Kira Case and expanded interaction with her fiancé. However, once Raye's character was killed, author Tsugumi Ohba believed that having Naomi search for Kira was a "natural and interesting development" in the story. Within the cast of characters at the time, Sayu Yagami was the only notable female. In adding Naomi, Ohba could finally have the "cool" female character he had always wanted. He initially planned for Naomi to have a long involvement in the story but underestimated the character's deductive abilities. Because she was able to uncover crucial plot information "faster than…thought," Ohba decided to end her character early or face complications with the story development later on. He described the storyline issue of Naomi as the greatest difficulty that he created for himself since the beginning of the series.

According to artist Takeshi Obata, after hearing about the storyline he looked forward to drawing her character since it would be his first time designing one like Naomi. Using the color black to convey her mourning over her fiancé, he gave Naomi a leather jacket then designed her face and hair to match her clothes. Because of this ordering, Obata states that Naomi was essentially "born from her clothes."

Trivia

 * The name Naomi here has no particular meaning as it is written in katakana. Other people with the name may have a meaning associated depending upon the kanji. For example, if the kanji is 直美, the name means "straight" (直) (nao) and "beautiful" (美) (mi).
 * Naomi's surname Misora means "beautiful" (美) (mi) and "sky" (空) (sora).
 * In the anime's first opening, Naomi is seen holding Raye Penber's corpse in a manner similar to Michelangelo's representation of Pietà near the 45-second mark.
 * In Death Note: Another Note, when Naomi is trying to decipher the possible writing etched into Believe Bridesmaid's back, she describes her difficulty doing so by saying that the English alphabet is unlike Kanji or Hangul. The latter suggests that she also speaks (or at least reads) Korean.
 * The same work, on page 125, mistakenly states her birthday to be February 14.

Quotes

 * "My fiancé… and the convenience store robber… and the busjacker… were all used by Kira in order to murder the FBI agents in Japan. I'm convinced of it."
 * (To Light Yagami) "Why do you keep checking your watch?"