Cursed Bunny: Stories

Kim Young-lan is the protagonist of “The Embodiment.” Young-lan is a graduate student in Slavic literature. Her character arc is focused on her shifting relationship with her pregnancy.

Young-lan’s pregnancy is accidentally caused by a prolonged intake of birth control, which is one of the story’s main speculative elements. Young-lan oscillates between two choices: She must either find a father to raise the child or raise the child on her own. When Young-lan’s pregnancy is discovered, her obstetrician frames the first choice as being physiologically necessary for the development of her fetus. This once again represents Social Expectation as a Tool of Patriarchy as it implies that Young-lan’s choice to raise a child on her own is unnatural. This idea is echoed by Young-lan’s family when they put an ad in the newspaper to aid with the search. Young-lan grows increasingly skeptical of this imperative, however, with many of her suitors proving either unfit or unwilling to become the child’s father. This inspires Young-lan to affirm her agency and capability as a potential solo parent.

The quest to find a father distracts Young-lan from looking after the real physiological needs of her pregnancy, such as eating. When her water breaks, she desperately tries to find a father among the paramedics, hoping that if she can at least fulfill the least rational condition of her pregnancy, then it will ensure her child’s safe delivery. Although Young-lan did not actively choose to have a pregnancy, her complex feelings around the loss of her child reflect her guilt over the tragedy of the child’s death. She feels complicit in the child’s death because she allowed herself to be swayed by social expectation rather than thinking of what her pregnancy really needed to develop.

The grandfather is the protagonist and secondary narrator of the frame story “Cursed Bunny.” He makes the choice to create and send out the cursed bunny lamp to seek revenge against the CEO who ruined his friend’s life. The ramifications of this choice spiral out of control, causing more damage than he expected.

After the bunny lamp ruins the CEO’s business and destroys his family line, including the CEO’s young grandson, the grandfather leaves his family in remorse, eventually dying in an undisclosed location. The grandfather’s remorse reflects his acceptance that revenge begets more revenge, driving a cycle of violence. His departure from the family signifies his decision to break the cycle, turning his life into a cautionary tale. He reappears as a ghost, telling the story of his revenge to warn the narrator against succumbing to the same impulses.

The trader is the antagonist of “Snare,” representing The Perils of Capitalist Greed and Upward Mobility. The trader’s greed overpowers his sense of empathy and humanity. He makes others suffer for the sake of increasing his wealth. This begins with the fox and continues all the way to his children, whom he abuses to maintain his wealth.

Once the trader has children, he uses his role as the head of the family to justify abusing them. This drives Social Expectation as a Tool of Patriarchy as a theme as he leverages his power within the family to his advantage. After his wife dies, the trader drops the façade of the loving family man, using his wealth to extend business trips and engage in various pleasures. This extends the cycle of violence within his family by allowing his son to access his sister’s room to rape her. The trader realizes the unintended consequences of his actions, and instead of taking responsibility for them by ending the violence, he decides to escalate the abuse by summoning a doctor to abort the daughter’s child without her consent.

The trader’s arc is dynamic because he too ends up in a snare of his own making by the end of the story. Left alone, haunted by the ghost of his daughter who demands her child, the trader’s last words echo those of the fox at the start of the story: “Please let me go…” (102). This signals the downfall of the trader, proving that his aspirations to wealth were always illusory and that the violence he committed against the fox and his family were needless.

The protagonist of “Home Sweet Home” is a young woman who has purchased a mixed-use building with her husband. The woman then steps into the role of landlady to her various tenants, managing the operational and financial affairs of the building. Chung uses this character to explore The Perils of Capitalist Greed and Upward Mobility, framing the acquisition of the building as the fulfillment of the young woman’s aspirations.

Coming from the nonprofit sector, the young woman sees the building as a validation of her strenuous efforts at work. She is contrasted against her husband, who has never taken the idea of his career seriously and has instead worked in various jobs to search for his ideal “alternative lifestyle.” This implies that the woman is the breadwinner of their household, which informs the shifts in their dynamic as the woman grows increasingly committed to their building. Ultimately, the husband’s infidelity, which culminates in the secret withdrawal of 20 million won to pay his lover to remodel one of their units, catalyzes the woman’s detachment from him.

The woman’s relationship to the building is symbolized in her relationship with the ghostly girl who refuses to leave the building. The woman retreats to the basement to seek the child’s company whenever she wants to escape unpleasant issues in her life. When her husband is renovating the third-floor unit with the remodeler who turns out to be his lover, the young woman and the child play with the costumes and puzzle boxes left behind in the basement. The young woman tries to get the child to leave the building with her so that they can go on walks, but the ghostly child refuses. The ghostly girl symbolizes the building, both in its need for protection and in its capacity to protect. The girl and the building are literally inseparable, and the girl harms or kills anyone who threatens the building’s (and her own) caretaker—the young woman. The woman finds comfort in the validation the building continues to give her, as personified in the girl. After her husband dies in a car accident, the young woman resigns the rest of her life to the girl and the building, seeing them as the only source of meaning left in her life.