Character · Serial Experiments Lain
Lain Iwakura
A quiet schoolgirl gets an email from a classmate who died last week, and the classmate says she only left her body behind.
In Otakana the clue reads: Quiet girl who receives email from a dead classmate
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Serial Experiments Lain
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Serial Experiments Lain opens with that message and never fully explains it. Lain Iwakura is thirteen, barely speaks, and owns a computer she does not use. Then she starts using it. The Navi in her bedroom grows across the floor and up the walls as the episodes pass, cooling pipes and cable everywhere, and the girl sitting in the middle of it becomes harder to locate.
The Wired is this show's version of the internet, and the question it keeps circling is whether the line between the network and the physical world is real or only a habit. Lain turns out to be a different person on each side of that line. She is timid at school and something else entirely online, and other people's memories of her stop agreeing with each other.
Thirteen episodes ran in 1998, directed by Ryutaro Nakamura with character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe and scripts by Chiaki Konaka. The sound design does most of the work: power line hum, static, and silences held well past the point of comfort. It came out the year Google was founded, and it reads now as unnervingly early rather than dated.
Spelling LAIN
LAIN is four letters and the odd one out in this library, since it is an English-looking word rather than a romanised Japanese one. It is a real English word as well, the past participle of lie, which the show's themes make hard to read as a coincidence. Watch the vowel order: A then I, not LIAN and not LIEN.