The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

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“The Second Bakery Attack”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Second Bakery Attack” Summary

“The Second Bakery Attack” is the story of a recently married couple in their late twenties. One night, after eating dinner and going to bed, the couple are so hungry they cannot sleep. They have very little food in the house—only some beers and cookies. After they finish the cookies and the beer, the man—who is the narrator of the story—recalls that the only other time he was this hungry was when he and his friend tried to rob a bakery 10 years before. He tells his wife about the experience: He and his friend, both determined not to work for money, decided one night to rob a bakery. But the baker, an admirer of classical music, presented them with an alternative proposal, saying he would give them all the bread they could carry if they listened to some Richard Wagner records with him.

This story convinces the wife that the foiled bakery attack is to blame for their present hunger. The baker must have put some sort of curse on her husband, and the only way to break the curse is to rob another bakery. The two drive around Tokyo in search of a bakery, equipped with ski masks and a shotgun, but it is past two in the morning, and no bakeries are open. The couple decide to rob a McDonald’s instead. They enter the restaurant and demand 30 Big Macs, and the three employees do as they are told. The husband and wife drive to an empty parking lot and eat the Big Macs until they are full.

“The Second Bakery Attack” Analysis

Internality and Social Relationships is a central theme of the second story in the collection. The narrator himself is a notably passive character. From the very beginning of the story, he professes the position “that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not” (36). In the story, it is the narrator’s wife who decides that the couple must rob a bakery, and the man simply goes along with her plan—evoking an archetypical, biblical narrative in which the passive husband is drawn into wrong-doing by the wife’s schemes. When they do not find a bakery that is open, it is again the wife who suggests they rob a McDonald’s instead, and during the robbery itself, it is the wife who does all the talking while the man stands mutely by, holding the shotgun (which in fact belongs not to him but to his wife).

The man’s relationship to his wife reflects aspects of his earlier relationship with the friend with whom he had robbed his first bakery 10 years prior. Though everybody seemed to get what they wanted from the first bakery attack—the narrator and his friend left with enough bread to feed them for two days, while the baker found two people to listen with him to classical music—the narrator admits that he (and his friend) felt afterwards “that we had made a terrible mistake” (41). Murakami suggests that the failure of the first bakery attack emasculated the narrator—an emasculation that is carried over into his relationship with his wife, whom he passively allows to lead him into the second bakery attack.

The narrator’s arc in the story is underscored by a vivid daydream in which the narrator imagines himself sitting in a boat floating in the ocean just above a large dormant volcano. At the end of the story, the volcano vanishes, and the narrator feels at ease. Murakami leaves the interpretation of this daydream to the narrator’s wife, suggesting that the volcano is the “curse” of the narrator’s failure in the first bakery attack and, by extension, the man’s emasculation. The daydream also suggests that, in his marriage, the man learns to find a sense of freedom and absolution in his emasculation. Ultimately, the thing that causes the volcano to disappear is not the man assuming control of his actions but, on the contrary, the man allowing his wife to assume control.