The Bakery Heists

I’m on a Murakami binge. Shameless about it. He’s one of the best writers alive, has been for decades, probably will be forever.

The problem is knowing where to start. Norwegian Wood? Hard-Boiled Wonderland? 1Q84? Each one feels like it demands something different from you. You can see why people freeze.

Enter The Bakery Heists—a short story, illustrated by Kat Menschik, that works like a demo. Read it in an evening with a beer or coffee. By the time you’re done, you’ll know if Murakami’s your thing or not.

The plot is stupid in the best way: two guys are hungry, so they decide to rob a bakery. That’s genuinely the setup. Everything that happens next follows that completely dumb logic.

The story never explains itself. There’s a woman. There’s something that might be a curse or might be nothing. There are rules nobody enforces. A lesser writer would tie it all together—make it mean something. Murakami just leaves it there, suspended, like he’s shrugging.

This passage stayed with me: 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—it was evil that drove us by making us hungry. It’s existential by accident, almost. Two dumbasses explaining why they’re about to commit a crime, and somehow it sounds profound.

What’s brilliant is he treats the small and stupid as if it matters. The robbery, the woman, the rules, the maybe-curse—they all sit in the story with the same weight. Nothing gets solved. Nothing gets explained. You’re left just slightly off-balance, which is exactly the feeling I want from the fiction I read these days.

If you like it, you’re ready for the bigger books. If you don’t, you’ve lost nothing but an hour. The book’s cheap and short, so there’s no reason not to try.