Cursed Bunny: Stories

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After reading this book (and Happy Stories, Mostly) I can no longer say that I do not like short stories. There is clear proof that I can be fully swept of my feet by the right author. The first two stories will grab your attention and probably determine if you set the book aside or not. The first is about a haunted toilet ( The Head ) Finally, I want to congratulate the translator Anton Hur for having two of his works longlisted this year. Love in the Big City is the other one, which I also enjoyed. The stories effectively mix genres (anti-realist would perhaps be a good label) and also horror with humour. Over the last couple of decades, literary fiction has increasingly unhinged its jaws to gulp down genre fiction, creating new, lumpy hybrids — Stephen Graham Jones’ bloodily stitched together literary slashers; Susanna Clarke’s magic potion of epic fantasy and realism; Kate Atkinson’s sliding doors of historical fiction and time travel.

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. One of the recurring themes throughout the book is how destructive greed can be. In “Snare,” a man traps a talking fox who bleeds golden blood. He abuses the animal long enough to grow wealthy from the gold. When his children are born, his son also bleeds golden blood, but only when he drinks his sister’s blood. The greedy man continues to collect gold from the boy’s blood. His wealth comes at the expense of the girl’s health. His greed also led to his wife’s death. When she attempts to prevent her son from eating his sister, she dies. Ultimately, greed destroys the man’s life because he values the accumulation of wealth more than the lives of his family. Bora Chung (BC): Cursed Bunny as a collection contains stories that I wrote in different periods of my life, under various circumstances. “The Head” was written for a school contest. And I wrote the title story, “Cursed Bunny,” as a part of a New Year’s project for the web magazine Mirror. We were planning to write about the Asian zodiac but other writers took the more glamorous animals such as the dragon, the tiger, the horse, etc., and all I had left was the bunny or the sheep. I don’t know anything about sheep so I chose the bunny.

The first Korean speculative fiction to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cursed Bunny was first published by a tiny independent Korean publisher specializing in SF and then the English translation was published by a tiny independent British publisher and I am so very proud of Arzak and Honford Star. And I am eternally grateful to Anton Hur for all his efforts and achievements. A stunning, wildly original debut from a rising star of Korean literature—surreal, chilling fables that take on the patriarchy, capitalism, and the reign of big tech with absurdist humor and a (sometimes literal) bite. Well, if it is not another grim yet illuminating Asian literature. I was told how quirky this book would be, but my brain is still processing it the whole time (like wtf am I reading). In the ten short tales in this book, Chung masterfully combines elements of horror, fantasy, and magical realism to create a fresh and original take on 'genre-defying'.

CHUNG: Fairy tales - usually, the European ones that we are kind of used to in the English-speaking world has a certain way of plot development. And I really love that structure, so I try to use it whenever it seems fun. And I add a Korean reality, the things that I see or the things that I heard from somebody else and wed that kind of magical twist to it. And I hope that adds some fresh elements to the familiar structure. If the aesthetics of the book are the only thing of quality, think again; Cursed Bunny, is without any doubt, THE best short story collection I have read in a long time. South Korea’s Bora Chung’s short stories are brimming with horror, fairy tale elements and great doses of weirdness. This is a world where heads emerge from toilets, orphans acquire unknown superpowers, rabbits cause financial ruin and foxes bleed gold.

One of the most captivating short stories that describes the complex emotions of selfishness, greed, and revenge is titled, “Cursed Bunny.” The story is told through the lens of a grandson whose grandfather repeatedly tells him the story of a “cursed bunny.” The story revolves around a cursed bunny lamp that was made for the grandfather’s friend. According to the grandfather, his friend’s distillery company was ruined by a greedy competitor who spread lies about their drinks. The grandfather explains that “they claimed that anyone who drank [their drinks] would become blind, lame, or even fatally poisoned. Sales for my grandfather’s friend took a nosedive.” To return to Chung; I couldn't help but ask is she also relying on the wow factor - to gain attention and notoriety? Her work is described as innovative, genre defying, an exuberant mix of styles - but IS IT ART?

Godammnit! I liked this one. It's about greed and how everything has a price. I was gasping at the twists in this short story.Throughout the story, the woman’s concerns about the head are ignored by her family, who encourage her to leave the head alone and tell her it’s not a big deal. Her family refuses to validate her fears. Eventually, the woman capitulates, allowing the head to coexist unmolested.

Basically, I decided while standing there at the book fair that I wanted to translate this book. So I asked the person who was selling the book, I would like to meet the author or the publisher of this book because I want to ask them for translation rights. The person who was selling the books happened to be Bora Chung herself, who was helping out at the booth at the time. So I feel like it was fate. It was fate that I translated this book.Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s CEO and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a down-and-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell?