Review of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

“I feel like I’m being given permission to stay alive.”

— Bora Chung

I have been wanting to read Cursed Bunny ever since I heard that it was coming out. How I specifically had heard about this one was that Anton Hur was translating it, and I really like Anton Hur’s translations.

Korean literature can be tricky to get right, so the need for a good translator is high here. I’d never read any of Chung’s works specifically, but I knew of her; she’s a big figure in Korean literature right now, and she got her PhD in Slavic Literature.

These Slavic influences are ripe within Cursed Bunny, but more on that later. What also drew me into this book specifically was the cover: it screams danger and as if something were to leap out of you from some surreal dreamscape.

That’s the mood that would capture the vibe of the short stories perfectly, as they’re like horrific little fairytales that can really make you squeamish. That’s my warning going into this: you’re going to find some content in this book that may make you a little nauseous, so if you’re someone not into the grotesque, this isn’t the book for you at all.

With that being said, let’s dive right into this short story collection, shall we?

Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories inspired by Russian and Slavic fairytales, blending magic and horror to teach some critical lessons.

As written above, Cursed Bunny is not a cohesive novel, it’s a series of short stories that blend genre. You are going to find surrealism, horror, magic/fantasy, and science fiction all within the 256 pages these stories occupy, so you need to be ready to buckle in and take a journey on what it means to strictly not be defined by a single genre.

There are exactly ten stories in this collection, and I found a good chunk of them to be absolutely riveting, albeit outside of my comfort zone of what I’m used to reading.

Now there are ten stories in this collection, but I’m not going to discuss all of them in this review—that’s something for another time. I’m going to focus in and pinpoint the stories I found most interesting and had values I could take away with, so let us delve a bit deeper, shall we?

There are big kernels of truth to the reality we live in inside of the stories, so it’s not like it’s trying to be this way on purpose. Chung’s prose is like a knife, something that is very precise and clearly carefully deliberated upon when choosing its themes and subjects. The very first story is about a head appearing in a woman’s toilet, and she treats it with blatant disregard.

It calls her mother, asks for more in life, but she callously flushes it down the toilet. It’s her indifference that seals her fate, because when the head grows into a full-fledged human body, it talks back to her and says that because she never treated it properly, it’s time for them to switch lives.

The woman also shows sadness before this at the fact that she has aged, but the head looks like her when she was in her prime and at quote-on-quote peak youth beauty. The head, with its new body, flushes the woman down the toilet.

There’s also a sci-fi story that reminds me of Bigbug in the exact opposite way: it’s called “Goodbye My Love.” A woman, who loves her robot so much, is confronted by her other robots when they share a brain.

When they gain this humanist sense of the world, the robots link together, stab their owner and leave her to die, and then flee to live betters lives out in the world. Not as original as some of the other stories in the collection, and I found this one to be one of the least satisfying, but this is where we really start to touch into the realm of science fiction.

“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.

When the CEO’s son touches the cursed bunny, he, too, dies. The CEO is investigated for tax evasion and fraud, thus losing everything physical and emotionally dear to him in the world. He ends up dying as well.

The cursed bunny quite literally dooms an entire family, slowly driving them manic until the point where they froth at the mouth, don’t eat, and succumb to their madness. It’s a direct attack on capitalism and the unethical greed it causes to attain wealth, and I quite enjoyed that story a lot because of this.

Overall Thoughts

It’s a really interesting collection of short stories. The language of the grotesque is really difficult to write in because of how easily over-the-top it can get, but Chung reins herself in and creates something that one could easily call a nightmare of sorts.

There’s a lot of analysis to delve into with each story, and if I one day have the time I definitely would do a breakdown of each story because each and every one is loaded with something.

This is contemporary Korean literature at its finest, so I would highly recommend this collection to anyone who can handle it.