Cursed Bunny: Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

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The Frozen Finger (차가운 손가락) is a rather surreal ghost story, and Snare (덫) a genuinely creepy folk-tale type of story about a man who finds a fox, caught in a snare, that bleeds gold. He takes it home and uses it to build his wealth, but when the fox dies and his twins are born, his Midas-like obsession takes a sinister and disturbing turn, cursed perhaps by the fox.

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. Now a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Fiction. Winners announced Nov 15th** I only want so little,” said the Head hastily, “I’m only asking that you keep dumping your body waste in the toilet so I can finish the rest of my body. Then I’ll go far away from here and live by my own means, so please, just keep using the toilet like you always have.”Cursed Bunny is a creepy good time with something for everyone if only you dare to enter Bora Chung’s nightmares. For those curious, her award winning story The Head can be read here. These sharp social critiques and eerie stories are so well balanced and so much fun, I certainly will be thinking about them for a long time to come. Especially on dark and stormy nights… There are a couple of Grimm-like fables, Snare being a most disquieting effort about a fox that bleeds gold. Unfortunately, the longest story in the book Scars is also the most tedious one, an M. Night Shyamalan type thing about a boy sacrificed to a monster to save a village. Haven’t finished reading: Janusz Zajdel was a Polish nuclear physicist and a SF writer with an amazing dystopian vision. I started reading his novel entitled Van Troff’s Cylinder ( Cylinder Van Troffa, 1980) but then I started translating other Polish books at the same time and got busy with deadline etc and had to stop reading and focus on the translation first. This happens all the time. But I was translating Polish books at the time so Zajdel would’ve understood, I hope. Should really finish the Cylinder though. 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?

Most of the male characters in these stories hunger for power but are unable to stop it from corrupting them. Most of the female characters suffer, lose agency and are powerless in the face of patriarchal greed and control. The collection can admittedly feel relentlessly bleak at times, disturbing and frightening but with a staunch moral compass. There is little offered in the way of hope, or grace, or relief, especially in the Cronenberg-esque body horror of some of the more visceral stories, but with Hur’s crisp clean translation of Chung’s effective, simple language, it is hard to stop reading. 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'.

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My favourite really had to be "The Head" in which a woman is tortured by a creature that keeps emerging in her toilet bowl in this mildly offensive story. The story is a surreally humorous yet oddly upsetting tale that it was a brilliant piece for putting the wind up with that opening. It was just witless and aghasting, especially as a frequent user of a toilet. Bora Chung is quite impressive. The South Korean author has a PhD in Slavic literature and teaches Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University. She also translates Russian and Polish into Korean while having written three novels and story collections. Anton Hur is always great, having been awarded a PEN/Heim grant. The love of language from both of them certainly comes through in this collection. Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories inspired by Russian and Slavic fairytales, blending magic and horror to teach some critical lessons.

Honford Star describes Chung’s work as ‘genre-defying’, and this is certainly apt. Cursed Bunny moves from horror to science-fiction, from magical realism to dark fantasy with ease, and with a level of quality so consistent it beggars belief. Chung sows seeds of distrust throughout the book; there is a palpable sense that she is not on our side. She wants to show us something awful whether or not we want to see it. If there are weaknesses in the collection, they are minor. Goodbye, My Love, a story about androids, seems misplaced, and of all the stories has the most familiar plot; but as a meditation on abuse, and the nature of love and memory, it works well. With the very real risk of being called a party pooper, a spoil-sport, old-fashioned and worse, I think Bora Chung's short story collection is bitter, sour, cruel, depressing, and yes ultimately evil. I took the first story seriously thinking that she was making a strong comparison between the haves and have nots - but by the end I was laughing because of the un-erasable image of that woman emerging from the toilet, with her wet hair hanging over her face - The Ring, horror film 2002 - anyone? Ok, so she's climbing out of a tv. 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. The book is the debut short story collection by the Korean author, Bora Chung. I’ve had this strange book on my radar before it was longlisted for the Booker. A few of my GR friends raved about it and it prompted me to read a sample story I found on the internet. The story is called The Embodiment, a harrowing example of body horror and it still one of my favorites from the collection. escalating into full-on wails. Whether they were tears of relief, sadness from losing the baby, or of something else entirely, she herself couldn’t tell.

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Una variada colección de cuentos cortos por Bora Chung. La portada fue suficiente razón para aventurarme. Algunos muy lindos hallazgos, otros no tanto. El inodoro ya no es el lugar seguro que alguna vez conocí, y nunca voy a tocar una lámpara con forma de conejo, no importa qué. Un gran comienzo con unas verdaderamente sobresalientes historias, el impulso gradualmente disminuyendo hasta que para el final solo deseaba terminar para seguir con otra cosa. I shall take this opportunity to be ridiculously ambitious and say: Octavia Butler. A girl can dream.

These stories will make your eyes pop out with horror, make you shift uncomfortably and wonder at Bora Chung’s infinite creativity. There’s a craft to writing an awe inspiring short story and it’s definitely present here. Each story is perfect, they are unique and I highly doubt that there’s anyone writing short pieces of this standard and brain warping quality. The greatest horrors are the ones that feel very close to everyday reality and tend to revolve around the evils people can put others through, particularly for their own benefit. Scars covers an age-old trope of human sacrifice for a community as well as enslavement and abuse of an innocent child for profit, while Cursed Bunny (one of the most sinister good times in the whole book) is a revenge tale against a corporate CEO for having used his position of power and privilege to destroy a struggling family. The final story, Reunion, best exemplifies a theme that is an undercurrent of many of these stories: And as her life proceeds, to parenthood and middle age, the Head constantly haunts her, finishing body all the time, until one day …

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The Head” follows a woman haunted by her own bodily waste. “The Embodiment” takes us into a dystopian gynecology office where a pregnant woman is told that she must find a father for her baby or face horrific consequences. Another story follows a young monster, forced into underground fight rings without knowing his own power. The titular fable centers on a cursed lamp in the shape of a rabbit, fit for a child’s bedroom but for its sinister capabilities. We cannot forget to give credit to the talented Anton Hur for the impeccable translation of Chung’s work. The translation of Cursed Bunny is so beautifully natural, that it is often easy to forget that this was first written in Korean. Hur has received multiple awards for his translations and has taught the art of translation at many esteemed Universities. You would, obviously,” she said, “but why are you in my toilet? And why are you calling me ‘mother’?” In 2022, the English edition of her short story collection Cursed Bunny translated by Anton Hur was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. [2] The ten stories borrow from different genres, including magical realism, horror and science fiction. [1] [4] In September 2023 the book was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. [6] 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.