What is Serial Experiments Lain?

A 13-episode anime from 1998 about a quiet girl, a computer network, and a god who may or may not live inside it.

Serial Experiments Lain ran on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998: thirteen episodes, each called a Layer, made by the studio Triangle Staff. It opens in Setagaya, Tokyo, where fourteen-year-old Lain Iwakura, painfully shy, friendless, ignored at home, receives an email from a classmate, Chisa Yomoda, who has just died by suicide. The email insists Chisa is not dead, only rid of her body, and living in the Wired: the sum of all human communication networks, the series’ name for what the internet was becoming.

Lain asks her father for a better computer, a NAVI, and starts to pull at the thread: a hacker sect called the Knights of the Eastern Calculus, a dead programmer who has declared himself god of the Wired, and the suspicion that Lain herself is not who her family thinks she is. The series won the Excellence Prize at the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival, was a modest production even by 1998 standards, and has never stopped being watched since.

Serial Experiments Lain anime cover art showing Lain Iwakura — **THE GIRL IN THE WIRED**Cover art for the 1998 anime: Lain Iwakura, a quiet schoolgirl whose computer opens onto the Wired.

THE SHAPE OF IT

Layers 01–13

Thirteen layers

The episodes run from “Weird” to “Ego,” each announced not by a narrator but by a computer voice, Apple’s PlainTalk speech program, in its “Whisper” voice, a production detail the staff built from their own desks, since most of the creative team were Mac users.

One girl, three scripts

Lain has three selves: the childish Lain of the real world, the bold Lain of the Wired, and a third, sly one. Writer Chiaki J. Konaka and voice actress Kaori Shimizu agreed to write her name three ways in the scripts, kanji, katakana, and Latin letters, so the performance could keep them apart.

A small shelf, on purpose

Lain was designed from the start as a connected set of objects, anime, game, manga, rather than a story told three times. Each medium holds a different version of the same girl. The rest of this archive takes them one at a time.

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Three doors into the Wired

How was Lain conceived?

Producer Yasuyuki Ueda’s multimedia experiment, and the game script that was written before the anime.

What is the PlayStation game?

The strangest licensed game of its decade: a filing system, a psychiatrist, and no plot in common with the anime.

What is the Wired?

Telegraph wires, Schumann resonances, and a 1998 guess at the networked future that critics keep calling prophecy.

The Lain Gallery More from the Library

What is Serial Experiments Lain?

THE SHAPE OF IT

START HERE

THE FIRST WORD