Twisted Stories

Review of Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan (USA: Verso Books, 2019)
By Intan Paramaditha

Ten years ago, I read Eka Kurniawan’s “The Otter Amulet” (Jimat Sero), a story about a former bully victim who uses an amulet to protect himself from harm, an outsider trying to fit in. It was written for a horror story anthology, a tribute to Indonesia’s most prolific horror writer Abdullah Harahap, that Eka co-wrote with Ugoran Prasad and myself. I was struck, perhaps with envy, by the way he presents horror that creeps in silently. I was not shocked by the violent scenes but rather the perverse moments revealing the uncanny ways in which the protagonist sees and understands events. It is a story about the horror of looking. In Eka Kurniawan’s universe, the gaze can be disturbing, exposing the darker side of what it means to be human.

“The Otter Amulet” reappears as one of the strongest stories in Eka Kurniawan’s new story collection, Kitchen Curse, and forms an apt showcase for the style and themes that recur in Eka’s writing: violence, revenge, and sex told through a deadpan voice. While not all stories in the collection delve into horror in the same way as “The Otter Amulet,” most of them evoke the influences of Abdullah Harahap, pulp fiction, and B-movies, reminding us of Eka’s novella Vengeance is Mine: All Others Pay Cash (2017), as well as the interrogation of history and the blending of the everyday and the fantastic, found in Eka’s debut novel Beauty is a Wound (2015). The sixteen short stories in Kitchen Curse are twisted, funny, and visceral. They provide ways of looking at Indonesia’s politics, history, and culture through the lens of the everyday and the marginal: the world of the outcasts.

Kitchen Curse features an array of characters who live in the margins of society: underdogs, bully-victims, abused women, madmen. In “No Crazies in This Town,” homeless people with mental illness are exploited as sex objects and spectacles for tourists in a beach town on the southern coast of Java. The vulnerability of characters does not automatically transform into melodrama nor evoke pity. There are no voices obviously sympathetic towards the exploited “crazies”; rather, the narrator describes how it is all pure business for the townspeople. The mentally ill are hot commodities when the vacation season comes, but they can be tossed away easily: “They could be discarded because business was good, and that made the pious folk happy.” The unemotional way of storytelling underlines the problematic gaze of the people, heightening the horror of a tourist town without a moral compass.

Eka Kurniawan’s characters are weird, and their encounters with events that are strange, unfortunate, or magical (sometimes all of them at the same time) further spotlight their moral ambiguity. The former bully victim in “The Otter Amulet” is traumatized by a past event but feels content with acts of violence and betrayal in the present, thanks to the Otter Amulet in his pocket:

“His gaze terrified me, and I started crying from that night on. How could I have forgotten him? But on this night, and for years afterwards, I remembered. But I was glad too. I was glad to see that blood on my hands. I was glad to see Raisa bathed in sweat on my bed. I was glad to see Rohman walking, stark naked, with his genitals hanging down, towards me.

The character’s past trauma has shaped his grasp of present events, as he understands the violent and the bizarre in the present as a normal and even happy state. Is this state of oblivion really the effect of the amulet? Or does it have more natural causes? The story leaves us in the grey area between the supernatural and the psychological to grapple with the reason why characters see the world the way they do.

Sometimes the strange characters are not even human beings. “Caronang,” another haunting, violent story in Kitchen Curse, is about the titular dog, a highly intelligent animal who walks upright, becomes part of a family, befriends the baby, and, gradually, turns the family’s life upside down. In this magical realist story, Caronang’s capacity to manipulate others seems initially like a harmless part of the family’s reality. After fighting over the blanket with the baby, “the caronang ran to my wife’s room and buried itself in her armpit. It was weeping. It wasn’t that surprising. We’ve had a pet monkey once who behaved in a similar way: fussy and crybabyish.”  However, the story of Caronang moves from the marvelous to the unsettling, particularly with scenes of banal violence: “Very early in the morning, the animal got down from my wife’s bed, took the rifle and bullets from the storage room, then knocked on Baby’s door.” In portraying Caronang as the source of horror, the story also asks the politically pointed question of what happens when subjugated subjects gain power and resist their subjugation.

Fans of Eka Kurniawan’s wicked sense of humor will enjoy the funny, quirky, and morbid stories in this collection. “Graffiti in the Toilet” is hilarious and playful, turning a vandalized public toilet into a stage for political expression in the late ‘90s. Despite the advice to channel frustrations to members of parliament, graffiti persistently appear in the bathroom. As one scribbler explains, “Blabbermouth, I don’t have any faith in our members of the parliament. I have more trust in the walls of toilets.” A darker tone can be found in “The Stone’s Story,” in which the narrator has access to what a stone thinks and feels. This stone is implicated in murder: a man kills his wife, ties the stone to the dying woman, and drowns her. “The Stone felt disgraced and unclean. It memorized the man’s face. It vowed, on the river and on the dead woman’s corpse, that one day it would get its revenge.” The black comedy in Eka’s stories is well captured by Annie Tucker, Tiffany Tsao, Maggie Tiojakin, and Benedict Anderson in their translations.

In Eka’s gritty universe, stories are permeated by a visceral obsession with bodies. In “No Crazies in This Town” and “The Otter Amulet,” characters gaze obsessively upon male genitals, describing their shape, size, and position in vivid ways. In “Don’t Piss Here,” a woman is preoccupied with the act of peeing: smelling the piss in the parking lot, imagining someone peeing with “blissful abandon,” holding in her pee. While the perverse gaze abounds in so many of these stories, “Rotten Stench” engages with the spectacle of grotesque bodies in a more somber hue. In a story about how easily people continue their lives after mass murders, we do not only see but also smell the corpses “in a state of decomposition and barely recognizable as human” and hear the noise of the flies and dogs fighting over their flesh. The deadpan irony, often achieved through the juxtaposition of hideous sights and merry language, highlights the darker side of humanity: our normalization of violence and willful forgetting.

Eka Kurniawan grounds the plots of his short stories in contemporary Indonesian history, allowing us to see Indonesia through perspectives from the edges, where major political changes conflate with the everyday. In “Easing into a Long Sleep,” an autobiographical story, the narrator recounts how he was born at the same time as the annexation of East Timor by the Republic of Indonesia, and how his father went bankrupt just like the nation that collapsed in 1998. The author’s ways of re-writing history often reflect a generational view. A university student in Yogyakarta during Reformasi, the 1998 political reform movement, Eka was exposed as a member of the youth movement to revolutionary ideas and witnessed the nation in transition. “Graffiti in the Toilet” exemplifies how Reformasi narratives circulated in banal public spaces such as toilets. The persistent yet changing graffiti, despite the continuous effort of the authorities to repaint the toilet, indicate shifting attitudes in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Freedom of expression has become the mantra, and political sentiments must be performed, including doubts about the promise of democratization itself (“Reformasi’s a total flop, Comrade!”). In Kitchen Curse, “Indonesia” has many faces: an exotic beach highly commodified for tourism; a modern and alienating urban space; rice paddies and rivers polluted with corpses. Eka Kurniawan’s Indonesia is not fixed and coherent but a plural, unfinished entity with its contradictions and wounds.

Many stories in the collection may not pass the Bechdel test, as the portrayal of women characters tends to reveal more of the men who desire them than their own interests, longings, or rage. However, a few stories highlight women’s agency in interesting ways. In “Kitchen Curse,” Eka turns the kitchen from a domestic space into a battlefield. Like many protagonists in Eka’s stories, Diah Ayu is an outcast, an illiterate cook, but she is also “the woman who made war from her very own kitchen,” a rebellious woman whose strength and defiance remind us of Dewi Ayu in Beauty is a Wound.

The brevity of the stories and its effect on the character of the collection are worth noting. Before the decline of print media, Indonesian literature in the 1990s and early 2000s was shaped by the publication of short stories in the fiction section of national newspapers. Because of the limited space, authors had to find ways to tell their story creatively in 1500 words. Although this limitation may sound confining, it is clear that the newspapers had contributed to a vibrant literary culture in Indonesia for several decades. Readers, editors, and literary enthusiasts would engage in conversations around the stories published in the Sunday edition of major newspapers, and Eka Kurniawan’s stories were always the talk of the town.

As a collection Kitchen Curse is not bound to a single theme. Although some stories are stronger and subtler than others, overall, these stories are sites of bold experimentation. This trait reminds me once again of the Indonesian literary scene in the early 2000s, when short-story collections populated the bookstores. Authors would compile their stories, in which they had experimented with different themes, styles, and genres, into a single collection. Some of these collections, written by authors such as Linda Christanty, Nukila Amal, and Seno Gumira Ajidarma, are also very strong.

The publication of Kitchen Curse is warmly welcomed, and it is probably time to translate and publish more short-story collections. The opportunity to read more from Indonesia’s most exciting authors is something that international readers would not want to miss.


Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. She is the author of the short-story collection Apple and Knife (2018), translated by Stephen J. Epstein and published by Brow Books (Australia) and Harvill Secker/Vintage (UK). Her novel The Wandering, winner of PEN Translates Award from the English PEN, was released in February 2020.