← Back to the Library

How was Serial Experiments Lain conceived?

One young producer’s bet: that a story could live in the sum of an anime, a game, and a manga, none of them complete alone.

Yasuyuki Ueda was a producer at Pioneer LDC when he conceived Lain as an original work, no manga, novel, or game underneath it to adapt. He has called the decision “an enormous risk,” and the risk was the point: Lain was designed from the beginning to connect across forms of media. In an interview quoted ever since, Ueda put the method plainly: “the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products.”

So the pieces were built in parallel, and not in the order you would expect. The scenario for the PlayStation game was written first; the game and the anime were produced at the same time, with the anime reaching the public first. Yoshitoshi ABe’s short manga was drawn as a dōjinshi and folded into the artbook. Ueda and writer Chiaki J. Konaka both stressed that multimedia projects were not unusual in Japan, what was unusual was the contents of Lain, and the way they are exposed.

Producer Yasuyuki Ueda — **THE PRODUCER**Yasuyuki Ueda, the producer who pulled the team together behind a late-night original with no manga behind it.

THE CULTURAL WAR THAT WASN’T

Ueda’s famous remark

The remark

In an Animerica interview, Ueda described Lain as “a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we [Japan] adopted after World War II.” He spent years answering questions about the sentence.

The intent

His explanation: he had built Lain on values he viewed as distinctly Japanese, and hoped American viewers would read the series differently from Japanese viewers, a “war of ideas” over its meaning that might open new communication between the two cultures.

The result

When he found that American audiences largely held the same views on the series as Japanese ones, Ueda said he was disappointed. The war never happened; the argument became a shared reading instead, an early, accidental proof of how the Wired would flatten distance.

THE TEAM HE ASSEMBLED

Four names on every Lain object

Chiaki J. Konaka, the pen

A horror writer before he was an anime writer, Konaka wrote the series and co-designed the game. His page in this archive follows the scripts, the typographic tricks, and the three spellings of Lain’s name.

Yoshitoshi ABe, the face

ABe, who had barely read manga as a child, gave Lain her asymmetrical forelock, her bear pajamas, and the sketchbook look that still defines the series. He also drew its only manga.

Ryūtarō Nakamura, the eye

The director. Nakamura and Konaka shared a stated aim: to show viewers of fourteen or fifteen “the multidimensional wavelength of the existential self”, the relationship between self and world, staged in a teenager’s bedroom.

Triangle Staff & Pioneer LDC

A small studio and a laser-disc company’s young label made a series with no source material and no safety net. It won the Japan Media Arts Festival’s Excellence Prize the year it aired.

KEEP GOING

The experiment, piece by piece

Who wrote Lain?

Konaka’s horror-film toolkit: Godard’s typography, The Exorcist, and a heroine borrowed from his own Alice in Cyberland.

How was Lain designed?

The forelock Ueda demanded, the pajamas Kishida demanded, and the golden hairclip that never made it to the screen.

The Lain Gallery More from the Library

How was Serial Experiments Lain conceived?

THE CULTURAL WAR THAT WASN’T

THE TEAM HE ASSEMBLED

KEEP GOING

THE FIRST WORD