God Is Dead and Marx Is Dead and We Set Off for the Bakery
God and Marx and John Lennon are dead. We were hungry, that much was certain, so we wanted to do something evil. But it wasn’t hunger that drove us to evil—evil drove us by making us hungry. Sounds somehow, I don’t know, existentialist. So we set off for the bakery.
That’s Haruki Murakami, from The Bakery Attack, and I’ve been sitting with that paragraph for a week.
I’m deep in a Murakami period right now, which I know sounds exactly like what it sounds like. But there’s a frequency to his sentences—the way ordinary life drifts sideways into something it can’t name—that I find hard to resist. He makes time feel strange in a way I don’t encounter often enough to be dismissive about.
The Bakery Attack—published in a German illustrated edition as Die Bäckereiüberfälle, with artwork by Kat Menschik—is where I’d send anyone who’s curious but uncertain where to enter his work. It collects two short stories, both built around the same absurdist premise: young men, hunger, and the decision to rob a bakery. You can read it in one evening, with a drink. The Menschik illustrations are spare and slightly off—black-and-white in a way that turns the deadpan into something darker—and the book is a physical pleasure to hold, which matters more than it should.
The robbery doesn’t go as planned. Of course it doesn’t. What happens instead is stranger and more melancholy than any confrontation could have been, and somehow funnier too. Murakami’s people don’t act so much as they drift—they get acted upon, find themselves in situations they can only half-explain, reach for something solid and pull out something else entirely. The gap between intention and outcome is where all his stories live.
If you’ve been weighing the entry point—Norwegian Wood for the accessible reputation, 1Q84 for the full commitment, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World for the psychological depth—The Bakery Attack is the side door. Short enough to risk, dense enough to mean something. After it, you’ll know whether his frequency is yours. And if it is, you’ll understand that God and Marx and John Lennon are dead, and that this has everything to do with the hunger.