A bleak and absurd atmosphere pervades the novels of Bora Chung. Her readers will feel a shiver run down their spines when reading her works, among which is Cursed Bunny, a short story collection shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

    These ten stories are seemingly unrelated to each other, yet all are filled with revenge, curses, slaughter and betrayal. In the title story, “Cursed Bunny,” the narrator walks into the darkness after bidding farewell to his grandfather’s spirit who is standing still in the river of time with complete amnesia. “In this twisted world, this darkness is my only solace,” the narrator sighs. The short story “Snare” amplifies human greed and cruelty spreading beyond the main character’s yard in the form of a legend. With a shamanic ending, the writer tells us that the bloodline of greed still continues insidiously within human society. In “Goodbye, My Love,” the common motif of robots attacking humans is renovated with the tricks of love and betrayal between the master and the robot. “The Frozen Finger” tells a story of an eerie car accident in a swamp, where an insidious curse becomes bizarrely tied up with the driver’s memories of her dying, post-death, and living moments, creating a terrifying but intriguing experience.

    All ten short stories are briefly detached from the real world, and can thus be labelled as surrealism, magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, horror, or fable. However, this detachment is transient, because through these magical, frightening and absurd stories, we can feel the suffocating oppression and conflicts that occur as often as not in society, and witness the vile reality of greed and wealth.

    The talent to construct these fables stems from the writer’s free and unrestrained creative imagination. Chung, who studied in Europe and received her PhD in the US, teaches Russian literature and science fiction. Her academic and life experiences have given her the ability to “break” literary inertia and spiritual shackles, enabling her works to cross boundaries with ease—boundaries between life and death, human and spirits, humans and other species, and even humans and objects.

    In some traditions, human life is akin to a long river where life and death are the two banks. The journey of life may be likened to “crossing the river,” that is, the process of going from one bank to the other. However, in Chung’s stories, this process is often broken and the clear boundary between life and death is constantly “crossed.” In “Cursed Bunny,” life is frozen, or recurs as a fixed memory. When the grandfather, who symbolizes death, disappears in the river of time, the two banks disappear altogether, leading to an overwhelming question: “Will the river be in its original state of life without its banks?” In “Reunion,” an old man’s walks through a plaza in Poland unfold into a hauntingly beautiful story between the narrator and her tormented lover. She concludes: “Whether alive or dead, [we are] ghosts of the past.” In “The Head,” the garbage thrown into the toilet forms a blurred human head that often talks to its owner. As time passes, the head develops into a full human form, comes out of the toilet, and replaces its owner after stuffing her into the toilet. In these stories, the familiar boundaries between life and death, human and ghost, human and things blur or disappear, conjuring up the dark and uncanny.

   Reading this collection is like walking into a pitch dark alley alone, but when you gaze into the darkness amidst this tense silence, you may somehow feel a bit of solace. For only a lonely person can become so profound and deep, and only a lonely gaze so limpid and pure.

Jin Hezhe

Translator, Gwanchon Essays (People’s Literature Publishing House, 2012) by Lee Mun Ku 

Associate professor, Department of Korean Studies, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai