Cursed Bunny: Stories

The Korean narrator sits in a plaza, waiting for someone in the cold. A Polish man arrives, and they exchange greetings. The man has been expecting the narrator.

Many years earlier, the narrator and her friend met when the narrator was doing graduate research in Poland. She had been sitting in the plaza when she spotted an old man limping back and forth across the length of the square, moving faster than seemed possible. The Polish man noticed that the narrator could see the old man. He then remarked that the old man reminded him of his grandfather, who had been “lost.” Eventually, the old man disappeared, prompting the Polish man to declare that he would return.

The Polish man was a librarian at the university where the narrator was conducting her research. Though they did not acknowledge each other from their first encounter, the Polish man observed that the narrator was doing research on World War II, based on her book requests. The next time they met, the narrator was having dinner at a café in the plaza. The man invited her to have a beer.

The man lived in a small apartment. Believing that she would never return to Poland after the end of her research trip, the narrator accepted the man’s invitation to go to his apartment. During their proceeding sexual encounters, the man asked the narrator to tie him up as a way of quelling his anxieties.

The man explained his desire by telling her the story of his life. When he was a boy, he moved in with his grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor. The grandfather wasn’t Jewish, but was forced to work in a munitions factory by the Nazis. From then on, his life was defined by the need to survive. This extended to his life after the war, making him both extremely orderly and paranoid. The man obeyed his grandfather’s strict rules as best as he could, but when he was a teen, he began to rebel against his grandfather. When the man insulted his grandfather as a form of retaliation, the grandfather stopped interacting with him. He eventually died while watching television, after which the man described him as being free.

Both the narrator and the man can see ghosts, as evidenced by their shared experience of the old man in the plaza. Throughout the story, the narrator recalls a song the man always hummed or sang. The man explained that it was a song his grandfather used to sing about loving life despite its devastations. The narrator traces it back to a war film about the concentration camps in World War II. In the film, the protagonist sings to a Nazi officer to save her life.

Shortly before the narrator left Poland, she asked the man why he liked being tied up. The man explained that it made him feel safe, “like [he is] being given permission to stay alive” (241).

The narrator returns to Poland, bringing the story back to its first scene. Neither the narrator nor the man have gotten married. The narrator is preoccupied with paying off debts her mother has put in her name. The man was engaged to someone, but found that she wouldn’t indulge his desire to be tied up. The narrator reveals that she hasn’t seen a ghost since the old man in the plaza. The man, on the other hand, has seen ghosts his entire life, including those of animals.

When he was young, the man told his mother what he saw, which terrified her. She physically abused him to stop him from seeing the dead. Instead, the mother’s attempts to starve him strengthened his ability to perceive ghosts. One day, the man’s granduncle died. The spirit of the granduncle bid the man’s mother goodbye using the man’s body. The man’s mother became catatonic and has since been living in a hospital. The man’s father, on the other hand, is described as an “uncertain person.” The man explains that where his grandfather lived for the man’s survival and his mother lived for the man’s goodness, his father’s motivations were obscure to him. The man and his father are estranged. Nevertheless, the narrator understands that the man’s sense of meaning relies on satisfying other people. He had been raised by people who made him feel indebted to them for raising him.

The narrator and the man talk about the man’s plans of “[leaving]” that night. The man doesn’t answer. The narrator reassures him that she will stay in Poland, so the man indicates that he will stay with her. The next morning, the narrator finds the man dead by suicide. The narrator asks the man’s ghost if he would like to be untied. He accepts and she does so, singing the song from the film. Reflecting on the lyrics, the narrator declares that her life is defined by the uncertainty of the future. By contrast, other people like the man and his family are so tied to a shocking moment in the past that they end up becoming ghosts.

The narrator asks the man about the particulars of his death. After she unties him, they embrace and the man disappears, leaving the narrator alone. She waits for someone else to find her and release her from “[her] ties to this life” (247).