Cursed Bunny: Stories

Cursed Bunny, first published in 2017, is a collection of speculative fiction stories by Korean author Bora Chung. A scholar of Slavic literature, Chung leveraged her fascination with fairy tales, folklore, magic, and science to revise personal experiences and observations about contemporary Korean culture, resulting in the 10 stories that comprise the book. These stories allow her to interrogate patriarchal strategies, capitalist greed, and systems of power and control. Following the translation of the book into English by Anton Hur in 2021, it was subsequently shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

This study guide refers to the paperback edition of the Anton Hur translation published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2022.

Content Warning: The source material includes ableist attitudes about blindness, which are discussed in the guide. The source material and guide feature depictions of gender discrimination, pregnancy loss, child death, animal cruelty and death, rape, incest, child sexual abuse, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, death by suicide, and cursing.

Plot Summaries

The collection consists of 10 stories that range from weird fiction and horror to fantasy and science fiction.

In “The Head,” a woman is plagued by the appearance of a head in her toilet. The head is formed from the body and toilet waste of the woman, so it urges the woman to keep using the toilet so that it can grow. The woman struggles against the head’s demand, finding various ways to get rid of it. However, the head follows the woman into her old age, allowing the head to confront the woman once it has finished forming.

“The Embodiment” follows a graduate student named Kim Young-lan, who discovers that she is pregnant after ingesting an unprescribed dose of birth control pills. Young-lan’s obstetrician urges her to find a father for her child so that the fetus can grow properly, prompting a public search for any man willing to step into the role. During the search, Young-lan oscillates between following the doctor’s orders and resisting them, believing that she can raise the child on her own. This leads to tragic consequences on the day that Young-lan goes into labor.

The titular story, “Cursed Bunny,” is framed as a cautionary tale shared by the unnamed narrator’s grandfather. After a large company runs his friend’s distillery into ruin, the narrator’s grandfather fashions a “cursed fetish” in the form of a bunny lamp to exact revenge on the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company. The curse unwittingly spreads into every part of the CEO’s life, eventually destroying his family. The grandfather vanishes from his own family out of guilt, cautioning the narrator never to use the cursed fetishes to satisfy personal vendettas.

In “The Frozen Finger,” a woman named Teacher Lee wakes up in the aftermath of a car accident. Unable to see, she follows a voice that leads her to safety, but becomes increasingly suspicious of the voice, especially when it continually revises the story of the events that led to the crash. This leads Teacher Lee to her doom, as she wakes up again under the wreck of her sinking car, listening as the voice leads another iteration of herself out to safety.

“Snare” tells the story of a trader who discovers a fox that bleeds gold. The trader keeps the fox in his home to harvest its blood. After the fox dies, the rich trader uses his fortune to begin his family. He is surprised to learn that his only son bleeds gold as well, but only after drinking the blood of the trader’s daughter. The trader thus finds a way to exploit his son’s penchant for violence to increase their wealth, which leads to tragic circumstances when the trader’s daughter becomes pregnant by her brother. The story ends with the daughter’s ghost haunting the halls of the trader’s house as an unnamed villager sees the trader’s grandson eating the golden entrails of his father.

“Goodbye, My Love” is set in a future where the narrator has helped develop a line of androids called “artificial companions.” While setting up her newest companion, nicknamed Seth, the narrator turns nostalgic for the relationship she had with her prototype android, called Model 1. When the narrator learns that Model 1’s battery module is no longer sustainable, she decides to replace her with a duplicate android. Unbeknownst to her, Model 1 uses her synchronization with the narrator’s other companions to express her resentment for being replaced. The three androids kill the narrator and escape.

“Scars” tells the story of a young boy who is snatched from the street and forced to live in a cave with a giant crow monster. When the boy escapes the cave as a youth, he finds himself in a village where he is forced to use his monstrous abilities to fight against animals and, later, other men for sport. After the youth is abandoned by his handler, he reaches the hut of a blind woman who realizes that the boy was sacrificed for her sake, following an old legend that stated that the giant crow would curse the village with illness unless it was appeased by a sacrifice. The youth kills the crow to stop the sacrificial practice, but when he returns to the woman and her village, his monstrous abilities take over, and he destroys the hut and the nearby village.

“Home Sweet Home” follows a young woman who trades in her fully paid apartment for a building. The woman struggles to fill the building with tenants, meeting obstacles at every turn, from pests to the financial ignorance of her own husband. The woman’s only retreat is the building basement, where she befriends a ghostly girl who refuses to step outside. Eventually, each of the obstacles magically resolve themselves, primarily through supernatural and violent means. The woman resolves to never leave the building again, living in the solace of the ghostly child’s company.

“Ruler of the Winds and Sands” is a fairy tale about the war between a desert king and the master of a golden flying ship. A princess is sent to lift the curse that the shipmaster has placed on the desert king’s progeny, so that she can live happily with her future husband, the desert king’s son. When she meets the shipmaster, the princess learns that her quest is premised on a lie: The curse was not cast by the shipmaster but created because of the desert king’s greed. The princess lifts the curse and calls the king out on his lies and greed, which ultimately allows her to survive the destruction of the desert kingdom. She resolves to live a mortal life.

The final story, “Reunion” centers on the relationship between a Korean scholar and a Polish man who can see ghosts. During their first sexual encounters, the Polish man asks the scholar to tie him up in bed so that he can feel that he has permission to live. The scholar learns that this desire is a consequence of the man’s traumatic upbringing, which involved his physical abuse at the hands of his mother and the paranoia of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. The scholar returns to Poland at the end of the story, keeping the man’s spirit company when he dies by suicide.