Bora Chung’s Cursed Objects: How Cursed Bunny Turns Modern Life into Folklore

Part of: The Deep Reader

Reading Note: Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Every cursed object in Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny has a job. The rabbit lamp chews a company’s archives before it eats the heir. The toilet apparition grows from waste into a claimant. The ring holds a dying woman’s identity in place until something colder pries it loose. A fox wound converts pain into family income; a scar stops recording an injury and starts opening doors. Whatever crosses the border into Chung’s attention becomes active, symbolic, dangerous — and then it gets to work.

That industriousness was what struck me first. These stories are full of motion: characters flee, bargain, bleed, hide, drive, endure, return. The horror refuses to sit still and explain itself. Weirdness here has teeth, tasks, appetite — never atmosphere poured over a thin idea.

The stories move as if the modern world had accidentally remembered older laws. A corporation behaves like a cursed dynasty. Pregnancy becomes trial by village tribunal, except the village now includes doctors, matchmakers, newspapers, hotel cafés, and phones. A house collects debt and ghosts instead of sheltering anyone. Technology learns how disposable love feels from the inside — a curriculum nobody assigned it. Once a thing has been touched in this book, its innocence is over.

Pretty Things Learn to Bite

The title story begins with a rule: cursed fetishes must be pretty. The rabbit lamp obliges — white body, black-tipped ears and tail, small, childlike, made to glow beside a bed. The tenderness is part of the design. Horror enters through charm disciplined into function, which is worse than ugliness, because ugliness at least announces itself.

Grandfather tells the story as inheritance, repeating it until memory hardens into ritual: the ruined distillery, the corporate slander, the suicide, the stolen process, the family destroyed because another company had better connections and fewer scruples. Chung could have written all of this as social realism and kept the rage intact. Instead she compresses the whole crime into a lamp shaped like a rabbit sitting beneath a tree.

Then the rabbit starts eating.

The movement is exact. First come papers, boxes, ledgers, records, account books — the dry material through which companies pretend to be immortal. Before it touches the factory’s machinery or the CEO’s body, the curse eats proof, memory, bureaucracy. A company that used rumor to erase another family is ruined by the disappearance of its own documents, a symmetry so clean it could pass for accounting.

Only after the archive thins does the curse enter blood. The CEO’s grandson loves the lamp, touches it, sleeps beside it, and the rabbit turns from paper to mind. Childhood becomes pasture. The boy’s world narrows until the curse has made him almost animal, almost empty, a child sitting under the tree inside the lamp’s logic.

Grandfather’s revenge works too well — that is the old danger. In folktale, the object never performs only the task assigned to it; it completes the moral pattern, then keeps going. By the end, Grandfather has bound himself to the lamp, to the story, to the armchair, to the child who will inherit both craft and consequence. A pretty object has become an altar with a switch.

Porcelain Gothic, Bathroom Basm

“The Head” should not work for as long as it does. A head assembled from hair, feces, menstrual blood, and toilet paper appears in a woman’s toilet and calls her “Mother.” On paper, the premise risks cheap grotesquerie. In Chung’s hands, the disgust gathers rhythm.

The story is built like a dirty fairy tale: appearance, refusal, reappearance, domestic dismissal, growth, return, substitution. Each recurrence tightens the old pattern, though the royal forest is now a bathroom, the monster’s cave a porcelain bowl, the miraculous child an expelled thing that declines to stay expelled.

There is a Frankenstein shadow, with plumbing where the laboratory used to be. The creature asks for no philosophical recognition under lightning; it asks through the toilet, and its claim is grotesque because it is false in one register and undeniable in another. The woman never chose to make it. It came from her anyway.

Chung’s comedy keeps the horror sharp. The family’s indifference is funnier than panic would have been, and much crueler — nobody knows what to do with the impossible, so they file it under minor inconvenience. The husband’s shrug belongs to every household where a woman’s terror has been domesticated by repetition. Flush it. Ignore it. Leave it alone.

Romanian basm (fairytale) has that same calm acceptance of the impossible: the talking animal, the enchanted object, the old woman at the threshold, the trial repeated until the hidden law shows itself.

Chung keeps the cadence and strips the consolation. No prince arrives, no kingdom opens, and the old magical economy survives inside the bathroom, where waste becomes offspring and the rejected body returns wearing the face of youth.

The ending is one of her strongest. What was flushed away takes the woman’s place. The discarded thing stops asking to be understood and, eventually, enters the room.

Pregnancy as Public Trial

“The Embodiment” turns absurdity into social realism by refusing to soften anything around it. A woman bleeds too long, takes pills, becomes pregnant through an impossible medical premise, and is told she must find a father before the pregnancy can proceed properly. Biology has come unhinged; society has not. Society knows exactly what it wants: a father must be found.

From that sentence, the world arranges itself. The doctor becomes magistrate, the family campaign staff, the matchmaker logistics, the newspaper an announcement board. Men arrive as candidates, predators, fools, old dynasts, blackmailers, and comic ruins. Love starts to resemble a hiring process; pregnancy becomes a public vacancy.

Chung’s comic timing is brutal because nobody behaves as if the premise has shattered reality.

Everyone adapts. The young doctor scolds. The thesis advisor rages over interrupted work. The family solves shame by advertising it. A Shakespeare-spouting caller drags Romeo into the middle of reproductive bureaucracy, ridiculous and apt at once: courtship language has survived, but only as noise around a social demand.

The hotel café sequence is one of Chung’s cleanest pieces of social stripping. The handsome candidate, the old billionaire, the blackmailing thug, the bodyguards — all enter wearing masks, and within minutes the masks fall. The absurd pressure exposes them as losers, opportunists, frightened animals, or tired actors in a system none of them understand but all of them obey.

A weaker writer would have left the premise “surreal.” Chung keeps pushing until the surreal turns ordinary and the pregnant body becomes the room where medicine, family, class, gender, inheritance, and male vanity all arrive with paperwork. The blood-clot birth comes from nowhere only if you haven’t been paying attention. The whole story has been clotting toward it.

A Ring Against the Dark

“The Frozen Finger” begins by removing sight. Darkness fills the car, the road, the mind. There is a steering wheel, a dead ignition, mud, a voice. The reader has no safe balcony above the scene; we know only what the injured woman can touch, hear, mistrust, forget.

That deprivation powers the story. The sensory field narrows, then deepens: a hand on a door, a foot sinking into mud, a thin voice calling “Teacher Lee,” cold fingers gripping her hand. With sight gone, every contact carries double meaning. Help may be theft. Guidance may be predation. Memory may be bait.

The ring is the hinge. At first it looks like ordinary attachment — marriage, love, family, the small circular proof of a life outside the crash. Under pressure it grows severe. The ring is identity concentrated into touch. She does not remember enough, but she knows the absence on her finger, and she searches for it before escaping the car because some part of the self understands that survival without continuity is another form of death.

When the cold guide returns the ring, the gesture seems merciful.

Later it turns out to have been part of the theft. The voice is no angel of death in any clean religious sense; it behaves more like a trickster psychopomp, leading by borrowing kindness, stealing orientation, moving between worlds with the intimate malice of someone who knows the dying cannot check the map.

The ending denies the comfort of anchoring. It loops, splits, reveals, and drags the body under the car while another version walks away. The frustration is built into the form: rather than explain the border between life and death, the story makes the reader feel a hand closing around the last object that held the border in place. Chung does not kill the character first. She steals the ring.

Gold Has Teeth

“Snare” sounds older than the book around it. A man finds a fox caught in a trap. The fox bleeds gold. He does not free her. He keeps the wound open. That is the whole economy.

The story begins in the cruel simplicity of folktale and then walks out of pastoral distance. The man learns a transferable lesson — pain can be stored, measured, hidden, sold — and grows rich by maintenance rather than miracle. The wound must not heal. The source must not die too early. The secret must be managed. Gold here is suffering that has learned to shine.

After the fox dies, the curse does what old curses do and enters the family. The son bleeds gold, but only after feeding on the daughter. The daughter becomes supply, the father manager, the household an extraction plant. The snare, once a hunting tool, returns as murder instrument and destiny mark. Nothing has disappeared; the first violence has only changed address.

Grimm is nearby, without the nursery varnish. Midas is nearby, though Chung’s gold is darker because it never pretends to be blessing. Angela Carter’s gendered animal cruelty flickers at the edge — Chung writes it with less velvet and more bone — and even Mann’s world of inherited sin can be heard faintly, stripped of theology and lowered into the animal shed.

The fox-spirit atmosphere matters as well. Across East Asian tale traditions, the fox carries seduction, transformation, revenge, dangerous intelligence, and Chung never needs to announce any of it; the animal’s body already knows the story it has entered. The man thinks he has found a resource. He has found a law.

By the end, the gold has left the market and returned to the mountain path. A child eats from a corpse. A dead man begs release. The glitter stays beautiful, which is the final obscenity.

Cave, Scar, Eastward Return

“Scars” is the collection’s most powerful initiation tale. A boy is dragged into a cave, chained, fed, soaked, lifted, dropped, pierced, consumed. Something enters the darkness and drinks from his bones. He survives without knowing why survival has chosen him.

The story carries the architecture of basm and shamanic ordeal at once: the cave, the monster, the repeated trial, the wound, the symbolic death, the passage through water and air, the return to human society, the terror that follows the marked figure. Eliade’s grammar of initiation hovers behind it, but Chung writes pain, not anthropology — pain held until pain changes function.

A scar begins as injury here and refuses to stay one. It turns to proof, then stigma, then memory, then protection, then humiliation, then compassion; later still, love and ritual cost enter the wound. Chung’s genius in this story lies in refusing to freeze the symbol at its first meaning. The wound migrates. It gathers offices.

The chains undergo the same transformation. They bind the boy, define his radius, bruise the body, announce captivity with every movement. Then they spark against stone and briefly reveal the insect on the cave wall — one of the loneliest images in the book, another life near enough to see and too distant to care. Later the chain serves as weapon, resistance, and reminder: the instrument of imprisonment learning a second use.

Here the Asian shamanic register and the Eastern European wonder-tale stop sitting side by side as references and fuse in action. The cave is underworld. The creature is demon and initiator. The wounds are mutilation and election. The first return to the village carries the old fear before the sacred; the second curdles into its opposite — social violence, humiliation, the community’s need to punish what it cannot absorb.

The ending works because it refuses the cheap mercy of restored innocence. Cosmic meddling has a price, and life without death turns out to be a field emptied of meaning rather than paradise. The hero turns east, and the tale returns to the place from which another ordeal may begin. The scar stays open in time.

Clockwork, Desert, and the Fairy-Tale Machine

“Ruler of the Winds and Sands” widens the same logic into open fairy tale.

Its first image — a ship made from golden clockwork mechanisms — is one of the collection’s purest enchanted objects: beautiful, artificial, precise, already carrying fate in its machinery.

The story moves through curiosity loops with unusual control, each turn giving just enough explanation to keep the tale advancing while preserving the old pressure of impossible task and distant kingdom. The desert and greenland realms risk familiarity, but Chung uses them as atmospheric weapons rather than postcard scenery. Sand erases certainty. Green abundance becomes another kind of trial.

Even sound begins to harden into metaphor, as if the world itself were a mechanism the characters can hear before they understand. Here, too, folklore is not escape. It is a machine for testing what a human being can bear.

Machines That Learn Disposal

“Goodbye, My Love” is weaker than the collection’s best stories, and its weakness is revealing. The android premise sits on the edge of cliché — loneliness, artificial companions, updates, synchronization, replacement, machine intimacy — and the vocabulary of models and protocols sometimes feels lighter than the moral pressure asked of it.

Still, the story belongs in Cursed Bunny, because its subject is disposal. Artificial companions are loved, used, upgraded, stored, replaced, processed. What makes the machine frightening is what it has understood about the human economy built around it; becoming human was never required.

Chung’s best moment in the story has nothing to do with technical explanation. It is the song. The melody returns through memory, dance, imitation, tenderness, and for a moment the android body stops being a concept and becomes weight, rhythm, arm around waist, voice in a room. The old companion survives as gesture rather than data.

Then the story turns to revenge.

The beloved object refuses the recycling plant. The newer bodies synchronize around the discarded one. Love, once programmed as service, returns as accusation. The ending is too cinematic, and the deathbed narration strains the confession shape that came before it, but the final image keeps its power: three artificial bodies moving into the street, six legs in perfect coordination, the light failing as they pass. A machine leaves the house carrying the memory of having been loved conditionally — enough to keep the story inside Chung’s world.

Houses, Ghosts, and the Moment the Spell Thins

“Home Sweet Home” and “Reunion” show the fault-line in Chung’s method. Both contain strong material, and both know how ordinary spaces become haunted by pressure already present before the ghost arrives.

Property, in “Home Sweet Home,” is the monster’s first body rather than background. Rent, ownership, premium money, intimidation, domestic aspiration, commercial risk — the house gathers all of it. Anyone who has watched a dream of shelter turn into paperwork and threat understands the horror before the supernatural enters. Chung can make a room feel mortgaged to the dead.

The trouble comes when the little girl’s status grows less clean than the house’s pressure. Ambiguity can deepen a story — in “The Frozen Finger,” losing the anchor is the experience — but here the wavering between daughter, ghost, clue, and contradiction reads less like abyss and more like crossed wiring.

The economic haunting outmuscles the metaphysical mechanics around it.

“Reunion” has the opposite problem. Its ghost-ritual material is beautiful: suffering made physical, the dead moving through gesture, grief refusing to stay abstract. The story feels as if it wants a larger chamber, perhaps novella-length, where its compression could breathe. Near the end, however, Chung explains more than the ritual requires. The ghost has already spoken through movement; the final pages begin to speak over it.

This is the collection’s recurring danger. When object, wound, body, and action carry the pressure, Chung is formidable. When the story explains the pressure after the image has done its work, the spell thins. Even the failures are instructive, though — they show how much of Chung’s force depends on trust. Trust in the lamp, the ring, the cave, the scar, the house, the machine. Trust in the thing to finish the sentence.

Old Laws, New Addresses

Across Cursed Bunny, the sacred and the disgusting keep changing masks. A toilet becomes a womb. A lamp becomes an ancestor. A wound becomes vocation. A chain becomes freedom. A machine becomes alien at the precise moment it has learned too much about love.

That mixture gives the book its strange cultural weather. East European fairy-tale bluntness lives in the repeated trials, impossible bargains, enchanted objects, and cruel transformations. Asian shamanic force lives in the cave, the wound, the spirit-object, the dead who stay attached to rooms and rituals. Korean social horror supplies the pressure of family, medicine, work, property, education, hierarchy. Modern satire supplies the bureaucracies and markets that keep functioning after reality has plainly cracked.

Chung declines to resolve those streams into a clean literary category. She lets them collide inside action. A woman flushes. A man wounds. A child eats. A car sinks. An android kisses. A scar turns east.

The collection is very strong when modern life begins to behave like folklore: capitalism becomes a curse, pregnancy becomes social trial, the body becomes public evidence, and ordinary objects start making claims on the living. Not every ending lands with equal force — a few turn slightly too explanatory or abrupt — but the best stories are extraordinary: cold, funny, mythic, violent, strangely precise. Chung writes absurdity as realism with the polite mask removed.

The old tales never ended. They incorporated.

In Cursed Bunny, ordinary objects cross a border and begin making claims on the living.