The Bakery Attacks and Dostoevsky

Murakami wrote two short stories called “The Bakery Attack” and “The Second Bakery Attack”, which look at a type of boundless, violent hunger that various characters experience. In “The Bakery Attack”, he writes, “At first, the feeling was a tiny little emptiness, only about as small as the hole at the center of a donut. However, as time passed, it quickly grew larger and larger inside of us, until by the end it had turned into a gaping nothingness with no end in sight”. I interpreted this “hunger” felt by the characters to be a pathology of the modern condition, where people feel a void within themselves that they struggle to fill, due to becoming self-fragmented and rootless in society. 

The narrator then says, “ Wait, maybe our lack of imagination was what caused this hunger in the first place… Whatever. God, Marx, John Lennon — they’re all dead. We were just hungry, and because of it, we were beginning to fall into the clutches of evil. It wasn’t that hunger was driving us towards evil; rather, it was evil that was driving hunger towards us.” 

In “The Second Bakery Attack”, the narrator represents his hunger through the image of an underwater volcano. He also references Freud, hinting the significance of the underwater volcano as the expression of his inner self. It symbolizes his suppressed depths, a plight of the modern condition.

This idea of metaphorical hunger had been explored by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, where he says, “Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? 'Feed them first, then ask virtue of them!'---that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed”. In the novel, the characters are driven by the “Karamazov soul”, an animalistic life force that expresses itself through gross indulgence of sensuality. They are unable to fully understand themselves and have purposeful self-fulfillment, or perhaps a “lack of imagination”, which leads them to not have control over their actions. It becomes a self-destructive pattern, in which the “evil” of society drives an emptiness or hunger towards people due to the unfulfillment of their deep desires, and they react to it. 

I am interested in how Murakami approached this question of metaphorical hunger, because to me his message seems to have a note of ambiguity. After the characters successfully rob the McDonalds and eat the hamburgers therefore acting on their urge, the narrator’s hunger, the volcano, has vanished. However, in “The Bakery Attack”, the narrators also experienced this: “By the time we made it back to our room, the nothingness in our stomachs had completely vanished. And, as if beginning to roll down a gentle slope, our imaginations slowly rattled back into motion.” For me, this calls into question if the curse has actually been lifted, because in both cases the hunger had been alleviated at least in the short-term. 

According to Dostoevsky, the indulgence of your superficial desires would not free your suppressed depths. One of the characters, Zosima, says, “ Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves [...] [the poor] simply drown their unsatisfied needs and envy in drink.”

If Murakami was inspired by Dostoevsky, maybe he agreed with this view and the curse had not truly been lifted. Alternatively, he could be arguing against it and that indulging those desires would succeed at filling the internal void. 

Alessandra Leone