“Bond Girls”: the Peruvian novel that takes agent 007 to Japan through the relationship between a father and his son | Enrique Planas

By setting his novel in a country that is the opposite of ours, Enrique Planas (Lima, 1970) seeks to put a distance between the story he writes and his own. “There is a Japan that belongs to all of us. It is the Japan of manga, anime, of our childhood memories, of our tin toys… and it is as universal as the world of James Bond that I cultivated with my father”, says the author when starting the conversation around to “Bond Girls”, a novel that goes to a classic —agent 007— but that is refreshed with references from pop culture. For this, Japan is the perfect setting.

For the writer, there are fictional territories that belong to us and that are sometimes confused with reality. Thus, he creates a universe within the Japan of the last decade of the last century that is intertwined with the Hollywood of even earlier times, but whose background is actually something much more earthly: the shadow of those relationships that become more complex when you are a father and when you are a son, which also includes a direct questioning of the hegemonic way of understanding masculinity.

Although “Bond Girls” has much of the heart of Enrique Planas, we are not, in any way, facing a work of autofiction. The weakness for James Bond and the way in which this character becomes a vehicle to explain the father and son relationship, are his, but the novel has a life of its own. However, it is inevitable to ask him if this book means a settled account for him as a father or as a son. “It is impossible to settle accounts, and even less so with a book. One will always have pending accounts with memory and with the people to whom you did not tell things in due time. Those are debts that will never be paid. Rather, I think maturity is knowing how to live with that and that you are likely to repeat some mistakes with other people,” he says.

We are facing a novel that its author qualifies as the product of a process as demanding as it is joyful. As is your reading.

– This book, like the previous one, takes place in a universe in which Japan is the protagonist. Do you have any special affiliation with Japanese culture?

It is not a direct fascination with the country that obviously could have it and would be justified, but because I believe that Japan is a geographical pretext to distance itself from many things. To be able to talk about the here and now without having to talk about oneself directly, without having to be obvious. So, when you go to the antipodes you have a much greater margin of imagination and to do something that I always try, that my novels are the most different from my daily and ordinary life. So Japan really is a great pretext to talk about much more urgent things. I have never been to Japan.

– Who’d say. After two books, you’d think you had some special affiliation after visiting him, or something.

With this book I close my Japanese diptych. I already said everything I had to say about it. What happens is that there is a Japan that is common territory: that of manga, anime, our childhood memories, our tin toys, and it is as universal as the world of James Bond that I cultivated with my dad. So, there are fictional territories that belong to us and that are confused with reality. For me, entering Japan is for me entering one of those strange territories that has to do with what you remember, but also with what you forgot.

– I understand, then, that you have plunged into a strong investigative work

It’s nice, because literary research responds to finding things that you didn’t know you were looking for. You are going to investigate with very broad previous questions, then more you are finding things like shiny stones and understanding that they are going to feel you for something. The image that I feel has more to do with writing for me is putting together a puzzle without having the key image. Without knowing what you are putting together, with the only certainty that the pieces fit together, that there is a correspondence between them. And the research process is putting those little pieces together until you realize that you have something.

– Connecting Japan with James Bond, said like that on the air, sounds a bit strange. But in the book universe it makes all the sense in the world. In the story you go to words in Spanish, obviously, but also in English and Japanese. Words that are concepts that configure ways of understanding the world. Was it very difficult to navigate the language that way?

It has been a challenge and a complexity and I did need help from people who are experts in the language to tell me when I was wrong. And yes, I was very wrong. But what I have tried, unlike my previous novel, “Kimokawaii”, is that in this novel the words work because of their context, and that those words have to do with the estrangement that runs through the entire novel. What I like are the coincidences that one does not imagine. This great coincidence of Bond and Japan arises from chance, and that opened my mind to reflections on language, but also on issues such as Bond’s machismo and the machismo of Japanese society.

– What is James Bond for you, besides the memory of your father?

I think James Bond is the model of masculinity of my generation, totally. It is what several generations of civil servants wanted to be, of people who punch cards… I love the scenes of Bond arriving at the office, punching cards, greeting the secretary, making a sexist joke, slapping her …was the dream of that entire generation of “Mad Men”. I think that was a model of universal masculinity. But fundamentally he was the point of contact between my father and me. And for that I owe him a debt of gratitude. For me, James Bond has the worst in the world, but also those subjectivities that I always appreciate. Fictions have something that helps us understand each other, even if it’s just for a moment.

– You go to Japan to deconstruct what it means to be a father and the relationship with the father. You tell me that James Bond marked the masculinity of your generation, is being a father what marked your deconstruction of that masculinity?

Being a father obviously opens other doors for reflection. Some of those doors open out of fear, and when you’re a parent, fear comes pouring out. I think we live in times in which we consciously try to deconstruct our masculine fictions, our way of being, thinking about equality in a conscious way. The world poses that challenge to us daily. When I see the James Bond movies I immediately have to think not only of him, but also of his victims and see how women have been progressively victims of Bond. From the first Bond girl to the last there is an arc of transformation that we don’t always stop at.

– Does that transformation bother you?

No, on the contrary. I celebrate it a lot because if not, we wouldn’t be able to see Bond today as an almost cartoonish character. People who talk nostalgically about Sean Connery seem to me to not realize how terrible they were. Today women face James Bond, defeat him, question him and have made him die for them. That seems to me to be a total transformation to the extent that he began as an absolutely individualistic character and incapable of thinking about the person he takes to bed.

– There are situations that you raise where traditional masculinities are broken. It is a novel very of its time, right?

I think that in all my novels sexual identities are liquid. All of my characters have had a back-and-forth relationship with the other gender. In my novels there is a lot of transvestism, but also a lot of need to think like the other or to take the place of the other. And not just out of empathy. From “Orquídeas del Paraíso” I work on the subject. I have always rebelled against that machismo that Peruvian literature has had since the novel appeared until part of this century. I am bothered by the deeply realistic novel and masculinity without fractures, beyond some exceptional examples. I’ve always wanted to make my characters fractured, wounded. All my characters always lack something.

– Going to Bond, to Japan, to your childhood… Is childhood our irremediable source of issues to remedy in spaces such as literature?

Not necessarily. It depends on the people, on the experiences. Depends on when it hits you. If it is in childhood, then we blame our parents; if it is in adolescence, we blame the friends we had or the girlfriend who left us. Sometimes trauma hits us as adults and then we go looking for someone to blame. We never assume responsibilities, we always look for others to assume it.

– And in this novel, do you assume any responsibility or settle any account? I say this because you talk about being a son and being a father…

It is impossible to settle accounts, least of all with a book. One will always have pending accounts with memory and with the people to whom you did not tell things in due time. Those are debts that will never be paid. Rather, I think that maturity is knowing how to live with that and that it is likely that you can repeat some mistakes with other people. They are unpayable debts.

– In a part of the book your character says that readers are ungrateful. In a country like ours, where it is believed that “people don’t read”, what do you think?

That phrase plays a bit on an author’s frustrations. I always thought of that character, an artist who feels out of date, who is outdone by his time, by readers, he doesn’t understand the moment in which he lives, he is still installed in the post-war logic when the Japan of the 90s was another thing… the worst thing that can happen to him as an artist is that he is obsolete, and in the story he feels that way. That’s why he has so many frustrations with his work. That’s why he thinks his readers are ungrateful. I would never say that readers are ungrateful.

– In addition to being a writer, you, as a journalist, see the world turn with impressive immediacy. Do you fear obsolescence? How do you feel in a world where everything runs so fast?

I am not afraid of obsolescence. I think it’s a false dilemma. In my case…among obsolete we cannot be obsolete. Something is obsolete when you look at it from the future or from a present looking at the past. But when you’re in something as analogical as writing a novel, finding a reader means finding someone with whom you share time. And sharing time with someone is living in the now.