In the backstreets of Shibuya, far from a typical visit to the city and an unlikely place to stumble upon without first intentionally seeking it out, sits a gallery. Inside, Yoshitoshi ABe hosts a retrospective look at his career through sketches, focused primarily on his most iconic work as the original character designer of Serial Experiments Lain.
It’s a wonder to see. Each wall is stacked, every empty space taken by sketches and scraps of unseen or early concepts for his work on the series. They look almost humble in this concept - aside from being inside a gallery and behind a plastic sheet as opposed to a frame - these sketches have each been produced on ordinary white paper and feel like the late-night doodles of a designer thawing out the ideas that would fascinate audiences and continue to feel like an eerie premonition for the modern internet over 25 years later. It’s hard not to stare, and perhaps I would if the space itself were not similarly humble. The underground gallery chosen as a display area is hardly big, and despite walls and narrow alleys giving far more surface area to display this work, there’s barely space for more than one or two people to view an entire section of the gallery at a time.
Still, I looped multiple times just to catch another glance, and that’s before checking out the available-for-sale acrylic prints of some of the most recognizable images of the series plastered large in the main foyer. A recreation of the cover for the Serial Experiments Lain PlayStation game was blown up into stunning, massive acrylic with red paint to represent blood, and it’s no surprise that despite the high price tag and a run of 50 units the item had already sold through its production by the time of my visit.
The exhibit was not solely centered on this series, as much as it has been heavily promoted as such. Dig deeper and you’ll find his work for Texknolyze, or the cover he made for Welcome to the NHK. His doujin works and far more can also be found here. But of all these works, Serial Experiments Lain, a series he created the earliest designs for and helped co-create, is his most enduring. Fascinating in its time and prophetic now, it shouldn’t be surprising that the story has remained so beloved to enjoy such a successful exhibition all these years later.
One look at the premise is enough to see why the series captured the minds of so many. What begins with a lonely and isolated schoolgirl named Lain Iwakura and her class receiving an email from a girl who recently committed suicide saying she’s alive but abandoned the physical realm to enter the Wired. What transpires there is a slow intermingling with this nascent internet-like digital plane that fascinates and transforms the Lain we once knew into something else, absorbed and consumed by the vast experiences of this virtual world that she may have the ability to bring together and merge into a new existence.
The series, at the time, was bizarre, but that was its appeal. Through ABe’s art the style of the series had an unnerving quality, thick in detail and digital overgrowth from power cables and wires yet also seemingly sterile and sinister. It was convoluted, at times too much for its own good, tossing through philosophy and questions of societal harmony at such density it can be hard to gasp for breath. But repeat viewings brought new layers and understanding, and for the otaku audience of anime at the time who were the spearheads of new technology and thus some of the first to already be online even at this pre-turn-of-the-century moment, it resonated.
It inspired a video game that was more like a disorganized digital diary that collectively told a story, a structure that itself inspired a recent new title once the sublicense for the franchise for derivative works became open source. With these factors and the high quality of the source material, even if the series was hardly a massive hit upon its launch it was bound to maintain fans and stick in the memory of at least those who saw it at the time it released. Then the world changed.
As the 2000s developed, more and more people got online for the first time. This was the time of peak forums and, in Japan, places like 2ch. Nico Nico Douga launched, a chance for Japanese audiences to share videos with people easily in a way that simply couldn’t be done before. Not only that, they could create. This led to the Vocaloid boom as people used the internet more and more as a place to share the inner aspects of themselves, their art, everything they are. And this is before we discuss the way social media like Twitter (now X) would come to dominate the public consciousness in a way unmatched in other countries, whether for safety updates on the 3.11 earthquake or to tweet about a broadcast of Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
Increasingly, the real world and the internet begun to merge. Trends seen online would influence the real world, and the real world would move online for convenience or monetary saving. At no time in human history could the past and present of art be accessible to anyone who sought it out, legally or illegally. And it was at this time a whole new audience found Serial Experiments Lain, and those questions it raised as an interesting hypothetical were now a concerning present.
Lain, through her connection to the Wired, becomes increasingly entangled with this secondary online space to the point her entire sense of self becomes warped, and it’s difficult to tell where and who the real Lain even is. Influencers and TikTok have basically mandated an endless scroll of content, absent of meaning yet inescapable, that has through its visual and spoken language concocted a new means of communication. Those who seek it big, regardless of how divorced it is from the self, must engage in that algorithm and expectation to make it. Indeed, the way in which the world revolves around a phone for transport, taxes, every facet of human life, arguably goes far beyond even the concept of the Wired that we see merging and shapeshifting before our eyes in the series.
None of the observations being made here are new, but they come into full focus with this exhibit and go some way to explaining how this event could even exist so many years on from its release. Serial Experiments Lain today can feel like an escape, or a window that gives a window through which to contextualize and put words to the turbulent, unstable and at-times overwhelming present we live in now. Lain became too entangled in the Wired, and now that journey is comforting compared to how much that merging has actually occurred compared to this prophecy. Its ironic.
Making one last loop through the exhibit, I find it amusing that a series so tied to the concept of the internet whose main flaw was not going far enough in exploring its potential pitfalls was conceptualized so crudely on such ordinary scraps of paper. Of course, ABe’s later work would see him experiment with digital tools of distribution, and the series is not immune to that space with VR events and the likes in its afterglow, but seeing this initial series be brought together in such an analogue form is alluring.
Serial Experiments Lain’s enduring legacy is tied to the greatest liberation and crisis of our age, and in its conclusion it determines a merger of the Wired with reality should not occur. Staring at these works of pencil scratch, I’m inclined to agree.
