“Bond Girls”: Lights’ criticism of Enrique Planas’s novel

Enrique Planas (Lima, 1970) has been showing, book by book, as an increasingly insular narrator within our tradition. In his previous novel, “Kimokawaii” (2015), he delved into the story of Michiko, a Peruvian otaku who embodies violence and tenderness in equal parts, who becomes entangled with a tired journalist whom she introduces into the raucous world of anime and manga. This fiction, written professionally and presented with diegetic efficiency, took on a convincing tension due to the well-developed clash of generations maintained by its protagonists. Reading him revealed to us a storyteller owner of a particular elegant prose that had no direct references in the national spectrum and whose thematic choices could not be chained to any author based in nearby reality.

In his most recent installment, “Bond Girls”, this situation is significantly exacerbated. Planas has conceived it as a clear sequel to “Kimokawaii”: on that occasion Michiko has traveled to Tokyo to learn the secrets of making manga. She puts herself under the orders of Takao Saito, a venerable mangaka in decline who has suffered a heart attack. It is known that the veteran artist keeps somewhere the adaptation of the film “You only live twice” – the emblematic title of the 007 series – and that the value of that hidden piece is quite high. Accompanied by Takao’s androgynous son, Michiko undertakes the search to find that treasure that will free her teacher’s family from the economic hardship caused by the illness that has left him in a hospital bed.

Planas chooses to establish his project in a distant imaginary, but at the same time seductive and with wide creative possibilities: that configured by Japanese literature, both in terms of its popular side and its more classical vein. Already in “Kimokawaii” the influence of the work of Osamu Tesuka (the creator of Astroboy, a character who has more than one point of contact with Michiko) was evident; in “Bond Girls” we can add resonances of the work of Asano Inio or Naoki Urasawa. High Japanese narrative also reverberates in these pages: we find in them tributes to the delicate naturalistic descriptions of Kawabata, to the urban despair of Osamu Dazai, to the psychological exploration of a Mishima. These multiple traces lead Planas many times to transform his paragraphs into a kind of precise animated boxes tributary to the manga; in others, they become substantial pictures where the tribulations of ancient honor and private crossroads are illustrated from an expressionism of chiaroscuro content.

This aesthetic proposal offers us moments of rare beauty derived from an imagination attentive to the details of the universe it builds. But that display has a price: the weakening of the narrative tension, which entails the entrapment of what is told in certain rooms. Fortunately, this is a minor problem compared to the virtues of the volume: a neat diction, the mature treatment of the great themes (the father-son relationship, extreme violence, the limits between fiction and reality, sexual fetishism) and above all a carved awareness of the strangeness that never falls into the exotic or the picturesque: that is the factor that distinguishes the path that Planas is tracing with sure originality.