Eka Kurniawan
Kitchen Curse: Stories (translated by Annie Tucker, Benedict Anderson, Maggie Tiojakin and Tiffany Tsao)
Verso: 2019
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My Lipstick Is Red, Darling”, from Eka Kurniawan’s new collection of short stories, Kitchen Curse, begins with a woman’s arrest at a brothel. She tells the police she is merely a housewife, not a prostitute, but her husband asks for a divorce when she finally gets home. The pages that follow delve into the husband’s perspective on how the couple met and fell in love — it turns out the woman had in fact been a prostitute in the past — and then switch to the wife’s view of the same events. On the one hand, Kurniawan is telling the story of a husband who becomes increasingly unfaithful, convinced his wife must be cheating because she continues to wear bright-red lipstick. On the other, he is narrating the experience of a woman who puts on make-up each day in order to win back the love of her wayward spouse, until she finally returns to the brothel, trying to catch her husband in the act.

In this tale of star-crossed lovers cursed by everyday jealousies and miscommunications, a game of parallel perspectives builds suspense. The plot begins and ends with the husband’s curt line: “I think we should get a divorce.” With the couple’s fate predetermined, what drives the reader forward is the tension between the double perspective, at once internal to the emotions of husband and wife and — in the evocative symbol of red lipstick, encoding both betrayal and commitment — external to them.

Doubled characters are prominent throughout Kitchen Curse, which starts with democracy in a toilet stall and ends with revolution in the kitchen, bringing together a wide range of stories with the author’s well-known pulpy content. “Auntie” follows the lives of two women living in the same household, one a mother and the other an ostensibly unmarried aunt with six fingers on each hand. The women’s experiences at first seem divergent but in fact contain a shadowed parallel revealed only at the end of the tale. “The Otter Amulet” takes the concept of mirrored doubles to a fantastical conclusion. The narrator, a young boy often beaten up at school, finds a protector named Rohman. Decades pass, and the narrator grows up; on a visit home, he meets the adult Rohman, who gives him an amulet for protection. But the magic object does more than just protect: our meek narrator becomes a version of the amulet’s previous owner, filled with the violent urges of the boy who used to beat his classmates black and blue.

• Tags: Eka Kurniawan, Indonesia, Issue 18, Lara Norgaard