The jacket copy for A Magical Girl Retires describes it as a “whimsical and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.” For once, a book’s marketing blurb provides a useful lens on the text itself: A Magical Girl Retires certainly has whimsy and imagination, but what stands out most is the sheer comic book of it all. As well as the evocative cover, comics artist Kim Sanho provides dynamic and thoughtfully composed illustrations for the beginning of each chapter. These illustrations each have a full page dedicated to them, and several are even split into multiple panels. The book is structured like a manga volume, too: the chapters are short and punchy, the plot episodic and melodramatic in ways reminiscent of serialised comics storytelling. But there’s a difference between homage and recitation—A Magical Girl Retires doesn’t just evoke magical girl manga, it feels like a novel that wants to be a comic, and is settling for second best.
The story begins with the protagonist contemplating suicide, her self-esteem issues neatly encapsulated in the opening line: “What’s the best way to die that would create the least amount of annoyance for everyone else?” Liz Bourke at Locus has described the novel’s tone as “breezy grit,” and the narrator’s frequent toggling between bleakness and flippancy provides much of the book’s humour. In the first chapter, we learn that our protagonist has decided to commit suicide because of debt, after losing her job and being unable to make payments on her refrigerator. However, she hastens to point out that “I still don’t hold the slightest bit of resentment toward the fridge.” She is about to throw herself off a bridge when she is scooped up by a mysterious young woman named Ah Roa, who tells her: “Your destiny is to become a magical girl.”
Ah Roa is soon revealed to be “the Clairvoyant Magical Girl.” She has tapped the protagonist as the prophesied “Magical Girl of Time,” destined to save the world not from demons or aliens, but from climate change. Our heroine is swiftly introduced to a society of magical girls, including a complex hierarchy of other magic users overseen by a magical girls’ trade union. A great deal of stress is laid on magical-girling as capitalistic labour. We see a magical girl job fair, including a keynote address by the union’s chairperson. The main character’s journey into magic is constantly framed in terms of employment: when Ah Roa arrives to initiate her into magical girlhood, the narrator wonders “couldn’t I just be onboarded over some coffee at home?” When creating a magical transformation chant, she is told to “pretend like you’re at a job interview and the job is being a magical girl.” And when she receives her unique magical talisman, she is dismayed to be given a credit card: “Way to tell the whole world that a corner of my mind is forever colonised by the thought of my credit card debt.”
It’s a solid comedic concept which enables the book to satirise the ways young people struggle in the contemporary job market. The trouble is, it’s vying for attention with several other satirical and dramatic concepts, and given the novel’s short page count, the result is that none of them end up terribly well developed. Another prominent thread, for instance, is climate change: when the narrator is told of her destiny to save the world, she asks if there is a secret apocalypse brewing that only magical girls know about. The answer: “No, everyone knows about it. Absolutely everyone.” There’s an appealingly grim vignette later in the book where the protagonist realises she will be forced to perform menial work in a convenience store while torrential rain floods her city:
As I hung the rag over the back of a chair to dry, I discovered a big black spot in the middle of a wall. I bent over to see whether it was fungus or the remains of a bug I’d killed, but ended up leaning my head against the wall, wiping away tears.
How am I going to go to work tonight?
How amazing it was that people went to work in this rain. Despite the deluge about to swallow us all, the fact that someone kept opening and closing the front door of my complex meant people were commuting to and from work, continuing to live their lives in the apartments upstairs. Working, dropping by the store, all the things they need to do to keep going. I needed to keep going too.
This chapter cannily depicts the essential absurdity of grinding away at our bullshit jobs while catastrophe unfolds around us, an increasingly familiar sensation to those of us lucky enough to be employed in the first place. This gloomy atmosphere sets the stage for the emergence of the book’s villain, but as we swiftly move on from there to a magical girl convocation and an epic showdown, the climate anxiety is left with little room to breathe.
Similarly, the book hints at a romance between the narrator and Ah Roa. Walking home from a job interview in the rain, the narrator runs into her erstwhile mentor:
I peered at her through narrowed eyes as she swung our joined hands from side to side.
“You’re someone I need to protect. You’re not the most important magical girl in the world, you are the most important girl in the world—to me.”
When did the rain stop…?
Realizing I was dry despite Roa having let go of her umbrella, I looked up. It was still raining, but the umbrella was floating in the air on its own, protecting us from the downpour.
“It was you! You were my destiny the whole time!”
It’s a nice image, but any meaningful intimacy between the two characters vanishes after this exchange. The plot is so brisk, and the characterisation of the supporting players so minimal, that asking us to invest in any of the relationships feels farcical; the book will have moved on to something else before too long. Even the story’s final resolution feels rushed and arbitrary, seeming to come out of nowhere despite literally being the title. All of this might be excusable in an actual magical-girl manga: an image-driven story like this feels perfectly suited to the breathless energy of a serialised comic strip. But, presented as a standalone novel, it feels flat and unsatisfying, recreating the weaknesses of the genre without any of its strengths.
A Magical Girl Retires is by no means an unpleasant read. At a mere 160 pages, the thinness of the novel’s plot and characterisation are less egregious than they might be otherwise, and it’s easy to get swept up in the exuberance of it all. But the dark humour and occasional meditations on climate anxiety suggest a more nuanced, interesting story that the book ultimately does not allow itself to be. An ode to magical-girl manga it may be, but A Magical Girl Retires is one homage that sticks too closely to the structure and trappings of another medium to be entirely satisfying as a novel.