Any anime fan knows Death Note, even non-anime fans have perhaps heard the name peripherally. The classic anime is beloved to all, but do fans know of or remember the Death Eraser? Death Note is an anime about a high school boy named Light Yagami who finds a supernatural notebook called a "Death Note". Death Notes belong to shinigami, or Gods of Death, in which they kill humans by writing their names and means of death in this notebook.
In the anime, the Death Note that Light finds belongs to a shinigami named Ryuk. Audiences follow Light's journey as he learns about the Death Note, how he uses it to kill fellow humans, and more specifically how he evades a brilliant detective named L after using it. However, a special tool known as the Death Eraser was omitted from the anime adaptation of Death Note.
The Death Eraser
Before the original Death Note manga that is commonly read today, creators Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata published a one-shot Death Note manga pilot titled The Taro Kagami Story. This plot is set before Light's arc. Thirteen-year-old Taro Kagami stumbles across Ryuk's Death Note and uses it as a journal, not knowing what the book actually is. Upon writing about his school experiences, he unknowingly causes the deaths of the school bullies that tormented him. After wrestling with the horror of these deaths, Ryuk gives Taro a Death Eraser, which gives him the power to erase the names of the people he wrote down in the Death Note and consequently revive them, provided that they were not cremated.
Ohba, the author, did not care for the Death Eraser as a useful tool in the Death Note universe. It can be inferred that this disinterest is the reason why it was not in the anime and main manga. In these versions of Death Note, the victim dies forty seconds after their name was written, unless the owner scratches out their name with two lines before this time lapses. There seemed to be no real need for the Death Eraser, since this is a way for victims to potentially be saved.
Its Place in the Series
If the Death Eraser was included in the Death Note anime, audiences would be robbed of the cat-and-mouse chase between Light and L. L and Light are incredibly thrilling to watch, as they are both equally matched in smarts and wit. With the inclusion of the Death Eraser, this race between the two characters will not be as enjoyable to watch compared to the story we know today. Light is sly, intelligent, calculating, and meticulous. With the inclusion of the Death Eraser, Light would have no need to craft elaborate ploys to evade being caught. All it would take is a mere swift stroke of the Death Eraser and any problem he would encounter is, well, erased.
Death is also not finalized in the presence of the Death Eraser. Consequences are completely eradicated. Even aspects such as Shinigami Eyes are rendered useless if the person who died can simply come back to life. The anime would be less interesting and steals away from the rules and bending of such rules that made the show so gripping in the first place.
It can also be argued that while the Death Eraser would make Light's use of the Death Note non-consequential and reversible, witnessing L's reaction to already murdered criminals coming back to life might be intriguing. Would the Death Eraser stump him, or would he figure out the tool? L was not one to rule out supernatural shinigami in his search for Kira, so perhaps a plot of him trying to crack how corpses are revived would have been entertaining at the very least.