Text messages, Amazon, climate dread, credit card debt, useless college degrees, Instagram, Covid-19. Though the twenty-first century has produced so much incredible literature, writers still seem to struggle with writing the twenty-first century itself. After all, what could be less sensuous, less rooted in the Canon of Great Literature than describing the transmission of a meme or the interest rate on a student loan payment?
Korean author Park Seolyeon’s English-language debut succeeds in ways no other recent novel has: in portraying the anxiety-riddled realities of coming of age in our present moment through an unexpected and fantastical lens.
A Magical Girl Retires (Harpervia, 2024), translated by Anton Hur, opens with our unnamed narrator contemplating suicide. At twenty-nine years old, she is drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is friendless, jobless, aimless, and sees no other path forward other than the murky water below the bridge on which she stands. Suddenly, a taxi stops on the bridge and a woman emerges in a frilly white dress. “It is not your destiny to die now,” she tells the protagonist. “Your destiny is to become a magical girl.”
To the uninitiated, “magical girl” most commonly refers to a genre of media, often graphic novels and cartoons, centered on young women with magical powers. The 1991–1997 Japanese manga series Sailor Moon, and its many ensuing adaptations, is likely the most familiar reference point for English-speaking audiences. The genre is wide-ranging—from the psychological thrills of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, to Studio Ghibli’s heartfelt Kiki’s Delivery Service, to the millennial-certified humor of Bee and Puppycat—yet often follows certain written and visual trends. Colorful and ornamented costumes, elaborate spells and transformation sequences, and narratives centered on themes of love and friendship are all inextricable from the world of magical girls. The combination of these elements gives the effect of a richly detailed collage one might find between the pages of a young woman’s journal.
Though our plane of existence may not have any such heroines, in the world of A Magical Girl Retires, magical girls are commonplace. Our protagonist’s ivory-clad rescuer, we learn, is named Ah Roa. She is the Clairvoyant Magical Girl and utilizes a compact mirror to read the future. Not only this, but she is an officer of the Trade Union for Magical Girls and has been tasked with finding the world’s most powerful magical girl: the Magical Girl of Time. It is revealed that the Trade Union is in search of the Magical Girl of Time as they believe she is the sole weapon with which to fight humanity’s greatest threat: climate change.
Now, for all the time I’ve spent defining the magical girl genre, I must clarify: organized labor and the horrors of capitalism aren’t your typical magical girl fodder. In Sailor Moon, for example, you can count on a buxom villain seeking to amass power for its convenient glamorizing effects—not man-made evil. In this sense, one might find Park’s choices ironic. Yet, I would argue that by having mentally ill young women in bows and lace stand firmly at the forefront of revolution, Park is not being cheeky. Rather, she’s taking a power that has lived in the hearts and minds of so many young people and propelling the magical girl genre into an entirely new dimension.
After her initiation into the Trade Union of Magical Girls, the protagonist is bestowed with her talisman (think magic wand, or something similar used to cast spells). It is explained that “the talisman will appear as an object that is very close to your heart.” How fitting then, that after swirls of rainbow light, the protagonist is left holding . . . a credit card. A black credit card bearing nothing more than her name. Needless to say, it is not long after revealed that our protagonist is not the much-awaited Magical Girl of Time. She’s still a magical girl, no doubt, but an average one with powers that are unclear and seemingly useless.
Our protagonist struggles to accept these revelations and, rather than heading into the streets to fight the forces of evil, she languishes in her apartment, agonizing over the thought that she let Ah Roa down by failing to emerge as nothing more than a magical girl with a credit card. Finally, she decides to try and get a job and finds employment working the night shift at a local convenience store. In these mundane moments, Park’s prose shines with its acute insights into millennial life: the aimlessness, the hour spent assenting to the whims of our elders just to get by.
It doesn’t take long for Ah Roa to reappear, though, and when she does, she shares a revelation: “I’ve thought long and hard about it. About why the Ahroamirror showed me your face so clearly. [. . .] It was you! You were my destiny the whole time!” Interpreting the relationship that develops between the protagonist and Ah Roa runs the risk of being too obtuse (“They are clearly just friends who happen to hold hands a lot!”) or too eager to find what isn’t there (“The protagonist wears a hoodie, which is so queer-coded!”). The simple, unadorned fact is that the protagonist and Ah Roa spend a fair amount of time with their fingers intertwined, proclaiming their devotion to one another.
I also couldn’t help but read into the protagonist’s first and only transformation sequence. Late in the novel, our protagonist emerges as the reluctant hero of the day. In an effort to save those around her (and, consequently, the world), she transforms without realizing it. When she looks down, the protagonist finds, “I was wearing a beautifully tailored black suit, the kind I had never worn before or even dared to want, or maybe I did in my heart of hearts[.]” Could the suit be a manifestation of the protagonist’s unemployment—her desire for a type of economic stability so often out of reach to younger generations? Could the suit also be a manifestation of her queerness—a first-of-her-kind butch magical girl? After all, the protagonist does give silent thanks that her transformation didn’t result in an “aurora borealis princess dress” like the one Ah Roa wears.
One of the reasons the book concludes with so much ambiguity is undoubtedly its length. The English-language first edition of A Magical Girl Returns clocks in at a cool 154 pages. This leaves little room for such a concept-heavy story to veer too far from the action at hand. The brisk pace means the story runs the risk of coming across lighter than it is and leaving the reader wanting more. Whether this is a deficiency on the author’s behalf or a signal of the strength of her compelling concept may be a decision left to the reader.
Prolific translator and writer Anton Hur proves a perfect fit for author Park Seolyeon. Both his original and translation work is steeped in queerness and popular culture, and these affinities help Park’s work sparkle with humor and heart. “Let me make this quick,” says a magical girl who has just appeared on stage at a union gathering. “I need three magical girls to help me catch a terrorist. Peace out!” Or, we have Ah Roa playfully encouraging the protagonist to unlock her powers: “Sweetie, I can turn into the devil himself if it means getting results.”
The English-language edition of A Magical Girl Retires concludes with Hur’s poignant translator’s note, in which he draws connections between violence against women, particularly in Korea where both he and author Park reside, and the unique power of the magical girl genre: “It is a trying or even traumatic event that awakens a magical girl’s powers for the first time, which means every magical girl in this book—and there are quite a few of them—had something terrible happen in their lives at one point or another. [. . .] Magical girls exist because justice does not.”
These themes are reminiscent of another contemporary Korean feminist classic: Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. As Kim Ji-young painted a portrait of repression experienced by Generation X women, A Magical Girl Retires builds on that foundation by rising from the ashes to explore new possibilities.
For those not already steeped in a love of the magical girl genre, A Magical Girl Retires may prove too concept-heavy to resonate. Yet, for every potential reader who takes a look at the cartoon cover and wonders how this book made its way into the “literature” section, there will be another reader, such as myself, who comes across A Magical Girl Retires, and didn’t realize, until that moment, the literary vision their life was missing.
