Sep 23, 2022
The main creators of Serial Experiments Lain, Ryuutaro Nakamura, Chiaki Konaka, and Yoshitoshi Abe teamed up again to weave a new story. The title "Despera" is taken from a prose poem by Jun Tsuji, a Taisho-era Dadaist poet.
Despera is set in Japan in 1922, in the Taisho period, and depicts a mysterious girl called Ain, reminiscent of Lain, who’s obsessed with technology and creates weird devices, Takeshita who uses a machine that can see the future and sells the information of future events to fund Ain’s inventions, and various historical figures and buildings from the period. There’s a mystical aura throughout the novel thanks to
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the devices. It has many illustrations from Abe, ranging from somber to more lighthearted which are excellent as always and greatly contribute to the atmosphere of the novel.
There’s a weird twist at the end focusing on exploring Takeshita’s character which is quite shallow. The novel is more like a draft for a larger story so in a way it is incomplete. After Nakamura passed away in 2013 the anime project got canceled for a while and got delayed again recently thanks to the pandemic. We can only hope the anime gets completed sometime and expands the story since it has a lot of potential.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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