There is a fountain on Castlehill, wedged discreetly into the stone wall opposite the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, that most visitors walk straight past. It no longer runs. Its bronze relief shows two entwined heads, one fair, one hag-like, bound by a serpent. Above them, a plaque explains, in the careful language of the guilty conscience, that this is the Witches' Well. It is a memorial to the several hundred souls, overwhelmingly women, tried and executed for witchcraft at this very spot between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. I pass it perhaps once a fortnight, on my way to nowhere in particular, and I confess I had never given it much sustained thought until a fortnight ago, when I finally sat down with Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny.
The specific episode worth dwelling on happened almost within sight of where I was standing. In 1590, King James VI, sailing home with his new bride, Anne of Denmark, was struck by ferocious storms and became convinced that witches had conspired against his life. What followed was the North Berwick witch trials, Scotland's first major witch panic, in which some seventy people were convicted, many of them on confessions extracted under torture in the Old Tolbooth, a few hundred yards from the well. The king personally supervised the interrogations, and in 1597 he set down his conclusions in a treatise called Daemonologie, arguing, at some length and with the enthusiasm of a man who has finally found his calling, that witches were real, dangerous, and thoroughly worth burning. It is a peculiar thing, growing up in a country whose head of state once moonlighted as a witch-hunting pamphleteer.
It occurred to me, standing there with the wind doing its usual work on the Esplanade, that Scotland's relationship with the idea of the curse is essentially one story. People who had none of the power they were accused of wielding were destroyed by people who had rather too much of it. Chung's collection, by grim contrast, imagines a world in which the curse is entirely real, entirely craftable, and passed down, like a trade, like a family silver, from father to son. It is, I think, the more honest nightmare of the two.
Cursed Bunny, first published in Korea in 2017 by the small, SF-specialist press Arzak, arrived in English in 2021 through the independent British publisher Honford Star, translated by Anton Hur, and reached American readers the following year via Algonquin Books. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first work of Korean speculative fiction to achieve that distinction. It lost the Booker that year to Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, the first Hindi-language novel to win the prize. No bad year for translated fiction to have lost in, all told. Cursed Bunny was named a finalist for the American National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023. Bora Chung herself is not, on paper, the sort of writer one expects to produce this particular species of horror. She holds an MA in Russian and East European Studies from Yale and a doctorate in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She teaches Russian literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University, and translates Russian and Polish fiction into Korean in her working hours. One imagines a scholar of Bulgakov and Lem quietly building, in the evenings, a bestiary of her own.
The title story is the one everybody remembers first, and rightly so. It is narrated by an unnamed grandson, relaying, as he has evidently done many times before, his grandfather's account of the family trade. The family are makers of cursed fetishes: objects commissioned, always for a fee, to visit ruin upon a specified target. The craft carries two inviolable rules. The first is aesthetic: a cursed object must be beautiful. The second is ethical, in its own crooked way: it must never be made for the maker's own grievance. The story's engine is the grandfather's single, catastrophic violation of that second rule.
There is a domestic magic tradition on this side of the North Sea too, though a far humbler one. Witch bottles, small stoneware or glass vessels stuffed with pins, nails, and hair and buried beneath a hearth or threshold, were interred by ordinary British households from the sixteenth century onward as counter-magic, meant to trap or reflect a suspected curse back upon its sender. They were never meant to be seen, let alone admired; their entire purpose was concealment. Chung's family, by contrast, is in the business of visibility. Their curses are gifts, wrapped and delivered, and the family's first commandment insists that they be beautiful enough to be kept on display, on a nightstand, in a boardroom, in a child's bedroom. It is a small but telling difference: British folk magic hides its fear underground; Chung's fictional Korea puts it, quite literally, in the light.
The circumstances are almost dully familiar to anyone who has read a business page. A friend of the grandfather's runs a modest, well-regarded spirits distillery. A much larger rival, envious of his reputation, spreads rumours that his liquor causes blindness and worse. The lies work. The friend's business collapses under litigation and lost custom, and in his despair he takes his own life. The grandfather, breaking the family's own commandment, crafts a lamp in the shape of a rabbit, white-bodied, black at the ears and tail, small enough to sit prettily on a nightstand, and has it delivered to the rival company's chief executive as an anonymous gift.
What follows is, structurally, a small masterpiece of escalation. The curse does not begin with blood. It begins with paper. The lamp's rabbits, for they multiply, in the story's logic, start by gnawing through the company's ledgers, contracts, and account books: the dry administrative tissue by which a corporation maintains the fiction of its own permanence. Only once the archive has been hollowed out does the curse move into the family itself, culminating in the executive's young grandson, who grows fixated on the pretty little lamp beside his bed until something in him is quietly, irreversibly consumed. The grandfather, watching from a distance the ruin he set in motion, eventually disappears from his own family entirely, consumed by a guilt he never quite manages to put into words, guilt that Anton Hur nonetheless renders beautifully in English. He warns his own grandson, again and again, never to do what he did.
Reading this as a Western reader trained, however imperfectly, in the traditions of Asian cultural history, I found myself resisting the urge to file it under "revenge fantasy" and leave it there. Revenge fantasies, in the Anglo-American mode, tend to end with satisfaction: the villain suffers, the avenger walks away lighter. Chung offers no such tidy accounting. The grandfather's curse works exactly as intended, and this is precisely his punishment, not failure, but success, and the discovery that justice administered outside due process metastasises indiscriminately, consuming an innocent child who had nothing to do with his grandfather's crimes. This is closer, I think, to the Korean concept of han than to anything in the English revenge tradition: not the clean satisfaction of a debt repaid, but a grief that curdles, spreads, and refuses to resolve itself even in victory.
There is also, running beneath the story, a sly and thoroughly contemporary critique. Any reader who has spent time inside a Korean chaebol, or, for that matter, any sufficiently large British PLC, will recognise it instantly: the horror of the company that behaves as though it cannot die. The lamp's rabbits eat the paperwork first because the paperwork is the company's actual body, its claim to permanence outliving any of the individuals who staff it. Chung's genius is to take that abstraction, corporate personhood, if you like the legal term for it, and give it teeth, quite literally.
It is worth saying, too, that "Cursed Bunny" is only the collection's most celebrated entry, not its only one. The opening story, "The Head," follows a woman stalked and eventually confronted by a sentient mass formed from her own bodily waste. It sets the collection's tone: body horror deployed in service of something more pointed than mere shock, here, an unflinching look at self-loathing and the body as a site of social judgement. "The Embodiment" imagines a dystopian gynaecological bureaucracy in which a pregnant woman is instructed to produce a father for her child or face unnamed consequences, a premise that reads, depressingly, less like fantasy than caricature. Elsewhere, "Snare" takes the shape of a traditional folk fable: a man discovers a fox caught in a trap that bleeds gold, and lets greed do the rest. The debt to the golden goose of Western fairy tale is obvious, though Chung ends somewhere considerably darker than the Brothers Grimm ever ventured. Throughout, Chung's characters are frequently unnamed: "the woman," "the boy," "the narrator." It is a fabulist device that leans on that same European tradition even as it draws still more heavily on Korea's own oral folk-tale inheritance, where the specificity of a name matters less than the shape of the moral lesson being handed down.
It is worth situating Chung within the wider wave of Korean horror and speculative storytelling that has reached Western audiences over the past decade, from the zombie catastrophe of Train to Busan to the creature horror of Sweet Home. What distinguishes Cursed Bunny within that wave is its refusal of spectacle. There are no crowds fleeing anything here, no elaborate set pieces; the horror is domestic, procedural, almost polite, which is, I have come to believe, rather the more Korean mode of the two, and certainly the one that has taken longest to travel.
I return, in closing, to Castlehill. The women interrogated in the Old Tolbooth, and the several hundred more commemorated at the Witches' Well, were killed for a power they never possessed, by a king and a society that needed somewhere to deposit their terror of disease, failed harvests, and disorderly women. Chung's grandfather, by contrast, possesses the power in full, uses it with precision, and is destroyed not by false accusation but by the accurate working of his own conscience. It is a curious inversion, and one that a Scotsman with my particular professional deformities finds difficult to set down without a certain rueful admiration. We spent several centuries drowning and burning women for imaginary curses. Bora Chung has given us, in a slim volume of ten stories, a curse worth actually fearing, and had the good sense to make it, as her grandfather-craftsman insists it must be, rather pretty to look at.
Anton Hur's translation deserves its own closing word. He was, in 2022, the only translator to have two separate works longlisted for the International Booker Prize in the same year: this collection and Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City. His rendering of Chung's prose here manages the considerable trick of being simultaneously plain, folkloric, and quietly devastating, never once reaching for an effect the original Korean did not already contain. If you have not read it, I recommend clearing an evening. Do not, whatever you do, read the title story with a rabbit-shaped nightlight anywhere in the house.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Aladin Bookstore
☞ Purchase the Translation (English Edition): Amazon
☞ Author Interview: YouTube – Running for Int'l Booker Prize: Anton Hur & Bora Chung's "Cursed Bunny"
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh