A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.

Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge.

But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.

But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too.

I picked this off a shelf in Waterstones Forestside because I was looking for a short and different read to re-invigorate my fantasy reading in the aftermath of Worldcon. I find myself veering towards shorter reads these days and at just over 150 pages Park Seolyeon’s English language debut is easily consumed in just under 24 hours of leisurely reading.

The blurb promised an atypical female protagonist, a plot with a strong acknowledgement of climate change and a non-western setting and culture – so yeah I was in.

I had not heard of magical girls before, but this is apparently a south Korean comic book/cartoon phenomenon that Park’s novella taps into. In its depiction within A Magical Girl Retires it reminded me of Kirstin Cashore’s Graceling trilogy. In Graceling asymmetric eye colours were indicative of having some magical gift or special power – a grace as it were – that would be revealed as the blessed ones reached adulthood. Some graces were mundane (the power to be a great cook) others more overwhelming. In the same way the Magical Girls have different powers (and associated costume changes) that are revealed when under moments of great stress. I guess the varied powers of the X-men make for another analogy – although the Magical girls’ powers seem more varied and less predominantly combat orientated.

The comic book foundation of the story is reflected in the elegant illustrations by Kim Sanho that preface each chapter – a kind of pictorial epigram or chapter summary.

While Park already has success in her native South Korea, this English language translation is her first venture into the anglophile market. It was interesting to read the translator, Anton Hur’s note about why this book in particular was one they were determined to translate – as it provides a complementary note on the main text.

Hur makes the point that South Korean media is full of stories of the consequences of misogyny.

“When you are living in Korea, as I am, you are constantly fed media reports of violence against women, a phenomenon made even more disconcerting by the lack of consequences for the perpetrators, even in the face of stark and overwhelming evidence.”

(Tbh there are similar horror stories within the island of Ireland too – with a soldier who launched an unprovoked attack on a woman and then boasted about “two [blows] to put her down, two to knock her out” escaped jail time as the judge deemed it would harm his army career, for some reason deeming the irrelevance of his ‘good service record’ as an ameliorating factor in the incident.)

Park explains the predominance of females within the cohort of 300 or so Korean Magical Girls, as being linked to their vulnerability – that this makes them more attuned, or more in need of additional powers. Certainly at least one of the magical girls has her powers triggered by an incident of domestic violence, while we meet our protagonist attempting to commit the most anonymous unwitnessed suicide possible.

However, the darkness of those themes does not haunt the prose as much as one might expect. In translation at least there is quite a YA feel to the 29 year old protagonist’s reflections on life, her beloved grandfather, her quotidian struggles with credit card debt and attempts to live a life of some small meaning. While the plot rattles along at good pace, it is the story more than the prose that catches the eye and gives one pause for thought. Though there are some lines that glow

“When Grandfather sat there in his store, he looked like he was rich with time, the walls covered with watches and clocks and such.”

This is very much a work of cli-fi (climate change fiction) and it is perhaps deliberate in leaving the first person protagonist unnamed that, in voice and identity, she can represent an every-person empowered as all people are to make their own contribution to resolving the climate crisis.

“The real crisis, the real apocalypse, is climate change.” The chairperson’s warm gaze suddenly turned fearsome. “The world will not end because of some demon or alien. At least not anytime soon. But climate change is an actual disaster that will destroy civilisation as we know it.”

Just after reading Park’s depiction of sudden storms and unrelenting rain flooding her protagonist’s basement apartment (reminiscent of a scene in the Oscar winning South Korean film The Parasites), I saw someone had tweeted (still not going to call it X, Elon) bemoaning the fact that extreme weather events are going unreported, not even commented on, as we become accustomed to the outrageous. The media reporting and under-reporting is not warning, or empowering us – it is anaesthetising us.

Park’s plot has some inventive twists and reveals. Like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future there is that sense that we owe a debt to future generations. As Roman Kranzic put it, we need to think about how to be a ‘Good Ancestor.’ Park’s protagonist in her reverence for her dead grandfather conveys some sense of that intergenerational responsibility. It is a scale of responsibility across time much neglected by the short sighted 5 year terms of political office, or even shorter one year returns to shareholders of capitalist accounting.     

I enjoyed my excursion into Park’s world and particularly her vision of a collective kind of heroism and the surprising impact of soft powers of people who feel quite ordinary.

“It got me thinking that its going to take the little bits of magic that a group of good individuals happen to have to fight against climate change.”

The book reminded me at one point of a part in Witches Abroad – my first Terry Pratchett read, where Esme Weatherwax having gripped a blade with her bare hand and been uninjured is seen some while later sitting with a cup of tea and needle and thread ready to finally accept the wound. The sense then was that debts or injuries, may be deferred but never avoided entirely.

The allegory that runs through A Magical Girl Retires is of debts humanity individually and collectively has been racking up. The day of reckoning is coming when those debts must be paid, or humanity as a whole will be written off as a loss. Park’s narrative cleverly considers and resolves both those outcomes.

A Magical Girl Retires is available now. You can order your copy on Bookshop.org