Roman Album: Taishou Dennou Dadaism Emaki - Despera

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 tothe 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.