Cursed Bunny: Stories

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From an author never before published in the United States, Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairy tales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung’s absurd, haunting universe could be our own.

Grotesque monsters often serve as villains in children’s fairy tales. The monsters in Bora Chung’s story collection, Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, are sometimes less obvious, but not less terrifying. The stories defy conventional categorization. They range from horror to fantasy to slightly supernatural, with the individual stories varying in how they integrate a mix of those elements into modern fables and parables. Another story that implicitly comments on the theme of selfishness is “Ruler of the Winds and Sands.” This story follows a blind prince and a benevolent princess that are soon to be wedded. The blind prince’s father claims that a sorcerer, known as the master of the golden ship, cursed the father’s lineage for cutting off the sorcerer’s arm in war. Three months before the princess and the prince’s wedding, the prince explains to his fiancé the story of the sorcerer and how their children will also be born blind. The nervous princess then sneaks out of the castle and with great courage asks the sorcerer to lift the curse for the prince and their future children. The sorcerer complies with her request, but says that he did not curse their family, but rather, ‘“they were cursed because they started the war. The air from the horizon to the sun and moon is a place man may not rule. My ship has sailed peacefully in that air since the dawn of time. It was the king of the desert blinded by his greed for gold, who first drew his weapon.”’ There’s a Japanese saying that goes, “Cursing others leads to two graves.” Anyone who curses another person is sure to end up in a grave themselves.’ A series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales, the English translation of which was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. The fictional short-stories blend the genres of magical realism, horror, fantasy and folklore, with some of those reading like critiques of social standards upheld by contemporary society (that don’t just pertain to South Korea). In ‘The Head’, for instance, a woman is confronted by a creature who lives inside her toilet, and who is made up of all the woman’s bodily effluence. Disgusted, she does her best to dispose of it, only to find it reemerging decades later, having grown into a beautiful young version of herself – and a vengeful one at that. It’s a story that speaks to the demands of ‘feminine perfection’ – a rejection of the abject parts of us and the weight of social taboos. In ‘The Embodiment’, a young woman finds herself pregnant – a side effect (in this bizarre world) of taking contraception pills for too long; she is pressured by an unsympathetic midwife into finding a father to help her raise ‘a normal child’, but upon failing, gives birth to a wriggling amorphous blob of blood. What a woman chooses to do with her body is of no consequence.Cursed Bunny,” the titular story, is the meditation on capitalism and greed that we all need in this day and age. A consistent theme throughout the stories are the notions of trauma, abuse, and power on our everyday lives, whether it’s from an external force or via an internal force, such as a family member. “Cursed Bunny” tells the story through a narrator whose grandfather knew this tale. A CEO’s grandson is given a cursed bunny and slowly dies, while the family quite literally rots of greed. Bora Chung’s first English translated work, Cursed Bunny, is one of several literary works that remind the reader about the harsh cruelties of the world that are often difficult to swallow. Along with publishing three novels and two other short story collections, she also translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. None of her other works have been translated into English yet, but Cursed Bunny is an incredible beginning for English readers to understand complex ideologies from Chung’s perspective.

i was trying to eat a Delicious Treat while reading it between conference calls, and i was delivered a cosmic punishment i do not feel i deserved.

Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it's almost impossible to put Cursed Bunnydown.”―Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble The idea of women not being fully in control of their bodies is repeated in other stories too, particular in The Embodiment, in which a young woman is surprised to find herself pregnant after using too much birth control, and is then continuously told by health care providers that the baby will not be ‘a normal child’ unless she finds a father for it. The story is also a comment on single motherhood and the constant societal pressure and judgment women face when it comes to their bodies, and their personal choices, and the grief of losing yourself in the midst of these pressures. And as her life proceeds, to parenthood and middle age, the Head constantly haunts her, finishing body all the time, until one day … The expected conclusion has its pleasures. But Chung’s writing is stronger when she leans toward literary fiction’s more open forms and pursues odder ends. In “The Head,” a young woman finds a disembodied head in her toilet, which claims to be the product of her waste. In “The Embodiment,” another young woman takes too many birth control pills and ends up becoming pregnant.