A Magical Girl Retires

by Park Seolyeon

translated by Anton Hur

My relationship with fiction was not particularly intimate until perhaps my mid-to-late twenties: non-fiction, sure; fantasy, most certainly; “literary” fiction, almost never. One of the earliest non sword- and/or sorcery-based novels I can remember choosing from the Barnes & Noble in good ol’ collegiate Indiana was Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails. Even with it sitting on my personal shelf for half a decade, I still passed it by like I used to skip the short stories when I first started reading The New Yorker in the mid 2000s.

As far as Boy Detective went, it should have been an easy start: I was fluent in the Johnny Quest oeuvre, though in an unintentional way, more through osmosis than experience. I never liked the Hardy Boys, either, though my dad tried his best. Imagine, however, if the homage was payed to something foundational to my media tastes. Imagine if instead of pulp adventure tales, it was Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon was completely my thing. In middle school, it aired at 7am each during the week; I had to be at the busstop by 7:23, which meant to be comfortable in making sure I didn’t miss the bus, I needed to walk out of my house when the first commercial break hit.

Sailor Moon incredibly fun to watch, and the fact that I never got to watch full episodes made it all the more tantalizing. To be fair, though, the parts I cared about were front-loaded–I wasn’t there for the magical girl transformations or monster battles. As a preteen, the thing I liked was watching the characters be in high school. High school that was just different enough, even with the extremely heavy edits for localization, that I was never quite sure what to expect.

So while I love the magical girl genre, it isn’t the magic or the girl that I like–it’s the slice-of-life that, even with superpowers and hidden identities, felt more real to me at 12 or 13 than Saved by the Bell ever could. This book delivers on that pretty well: the narrator working an overnight retail shift piqued my curiosity more than the mystery of the Magical Girl of Time did.

With that in mind, I haven’t been able to decide if Magical Girl falls into YA fiction or is just structurally simple, with margins and font large enough to assist its magical transformation from novella into full-powered novel. It’s a real breeze, even if it touches a few of the more Zeitgeisty questions of rolling into your 30s without previously fundamental adulthood-ties: family; house; career. It kind of tries to address the climate crisis while also mentioning labor conditions and the absurdity of modern social structures:

“They say great power comes with great responsibility. There are many complicated things happening to magical girls. Things like liability for property damage during their activities or being denied insurance coverage. Magical girls of legal age have it even worse. The other cases I just mentioned might be mitigated by having a legal guardian, but an adult magical girl has to take care of everything on her own. Which is why we need a union.”

If you’re intrigued by the premise of “What if magical girls, but real?” or “What if magical girls, but less candy-coated?”, Madoka Magica is darker and, to me, more interesting. My understanding is that there is a slew of western comics and cartoons–Invincible, The Boys; Powers–that take the superhero genre and apply a gloss of “reality”,  though I don’t have personal experience enough to say for sure. As far as A Magical Girl Retires goes, the premise is interesting but I don’t know if the story requires the presence of magical girls. As in, if you swapped the genre to something else, the grand metaphor would probably still hit the same. I personally love the art and flew through the story, but the book itself didn’t transform me, even a little.

Points for vibes, though.