Cursed Bunny: Stories

Bora Chung, Transl. Anton HurFiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Stories 1-2

Stories 3-4

Stories 5-6

Stories 7-8

Stories 9-10

Character Analysis

Themes

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Background

Authorial Context: Bora Chung

With three novels and three story collections to her name, Chung is a celebrated writer of speculative fiction from South Korea. She has won several awards throughout her career, including the Yonsei Literature Prize and the Gwacheon Science Center SF Awards.

Chung draws heavily from the traditions of Korean mythology and European fairy tales, the latter of which formed part of her study of Slavic literature as a graduate researcher. Chung has also cited Russian writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Polish writer Bruno Schulz, and Korean writer Wan-Suh Park as influences on her work, allowing her to invest her stories with a lens that is both feminist and surrealist.

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Chung’s authorial style is defined by her affinity for strange premises, which manifest as normalized features of the worlds in which her stories are set. Often, this results in characters having muted reactions to the elements that stand out as speculative. Chung uses the tension between the characters’ reactions and the expectation of how the reader might react to the same element to draw out the social commentary in her stories.

Consequently, many of the stories in Cursed Bunny feature characters who immediately accept that their personal challenges are being caused by unusual forces ranging from heads in toilets to animals that bleed gold. Although the second book of Chung’s work to be translated into English, Your Utopia (translated by Anton Hur in 2021) leans more explicitly into science fiction than magical realism and horror, its contents similarly take their premises as givens, rather than as occurrences that break the realities of their respective characters. For instance, the story “A Song for Sleep” centers around an elevator powered by artificial intelligence. The perspective of this story gives Chung the room to investigate questions of humanity precisely by interrogating what people consider “artificial.” As a whole, her second collection raises questions about humanity’s present direction in an increasingly tech-reliant world.

Literary Context: Translated Horror Literature from South Korea

One of the emerging trends in the translation of South Korean literature is the popularity of titles in the horror and thriller genres. The translation of Chung’s work, which began with Cursed Bunny and has continued with the translation of Your Utopia and two of her novels planned for translation in 2025 and 2026, represents the growing interest in narratives that reflect the modern experience of alienation and dread in South Korea.

A prominent writer to lead this trend is Han Kang, the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kang’s most popular novel among English readers is The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith in 2016), which tells the story of a woman who finds resistance from her family after she suddenly decides to abstain from eating meat. Though the novel does not involve any speculative elements, it zeroes in on the horror of childhood trauma and social pressure, using the consumption of meat as a jumping-off point for questions related to these topics.

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Perhaps the closest thematic comparison to Chung’s work may be found in the stories of Seong-nan Ha, whose stories prominently consider socioeconomic and feminist themes. Ha’s second collection, Flowers of Mold (translated by Janet Hong in 2019), is defined by its ominous tone, as well as characters who find their private lives infringed by others. One of the stories, “Nightmare,” considers a girl who experiences sexual assault, though her trauma and the resulting actions she takes to address it are downplayed as bad dreams. Another story, “The Retreat,” resonates with Chung’s story “Home Sweet Home” as it presents the quiet antagonism between landlords and tenants.

Both of these writers point to the ways that social pressure, which stems from the capitalist and patriarchal cultures that have dominated the country for many years, impinges life in South Korea. Chung’s work is in deep conversation with her fellow South Korean writers, albeit utilizing the speculative mode in ways that set her stories apart from those of her contemporaries.