a short story review

I'm a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. His integration of the bizarre in everyday life - especially in his short stories - always leaves me in a state of craving for something I can't quite put my finger on. Somehow I think it's related to the translation into English from Japanese, which lends a sense of peculiar grace to the narrative. It's incredibly expressive yet a little secretive at the same time.

I stopped by the library and checked out a copy of The Elephant Vanishes, a short story collection of his that I hadn't yet read. I thumbed through the collection and stopped at "The Second Bakery Attack," not only because I'm food-obsessed, but also because it reminded me of this incredible short story by Italo Calvino (another favourite!) where a gang of urchins decides to rob a cake shop and is foiled when one of the boys, starving and overwhelmed by the decadence of the cakes surrounding him, loses control and spirals into a battle against time as he tries to devour as many of the cakes as possible. Man against cakes - it's pretty heartbreaking, man.

"The Second Bakery Attack" also plays with this theme of hunger and desperation against time. It's 2am and the protagonist and wife are both woken up by agonising hunger. With nothing in their fridge except for butter, shrivelled onions and beer, the couple reluctantly settles on the beers to fill their ravenous bellies. The protagonist remembers a time when years ago, he and his friend had decided to attack - "not rob" - a bakery. In a bizarre twist, the protagonist and his friend are given a choice by the baker: they can have as much bread as they want if the boys will sit through an entire recording of Wagner's overtures, to which they agree. They put their knives away, listen to two overtures, and per agreement, walk out with armfuls of bread.

His wife ultimately decides that their crippling hunger is a curse brought about by her husband's bakery attack, so she convinces him that in order to lift the curse, they have to attack another bakery. They get in their car and drive around Tokyo, and find that the hour yields very few late night food options - except for McDonald's.

"We're going to take that McDonald's," she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner.
"McDonald's is not a bakery," I pointed out to her.
"It's like a bakery," she said. "Sometimes you have to compromise. Let's go."

So they end up pulling a heist at Mickey D's and walk away with thirty Big Macs, a fraction of which manages to quell their unrelenting hunger. They get Cokes, too, but the wife pays for them because they're "stealing bread, nothing else" while apologetically maintaining that they would have attacked a bakery instead, if they had found one open at the hour.

Something about the spontaneity of intense hunger (a common occurrence with yours truly) and the freakish banality of "attacking" a McDonald's spoke to me, left me searching as always after reading Murakami (not that I had the sudden urge to play stickup at McD's... though E. and I did end up going there immediately after to grab lawfully paid-for dinner, not gonna lie). I suppose it speaks volumes about my life that I could relate so intensely to the trauma of having an empty fridge, or to filling a gaping stomach with alcohol. "The Second Bakery Attack" is funny, and lacks the loneliness that haunts Murakami's other works, but the force of craving and desperation is well played.