百度搜索 村上春树短篇集 天涯 或 村上春树短篇集 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.
Did you ever try to share something that impresses you very much with someone who impresses you very much, only to receive an impressive lack of appreciation?Its like taking landscape pictures from your vacation, and then showing them around. Just dont bother.
This happeo me with Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a very talented, abs, inspiring writer who wrote the best short story I have ever read, "Sleep." He also wrote the following story (which is shorter than "Sleep" and thus more transcription-friendly), which I numbed my little fiyping out one day at work, risking my job, eyesight and circulation for the sake of e-mailing it to three ingrates whose puzzled, lackluster reaade them unworthy of my suffering. (I mean, I was also really bored and, irospect, potentially a bit touched that day; but thats beside the point.)
I guess we must choose our cultural battles carefully.
But if at least one person is searg for some eleic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain.
=============================================
The Sed Bakery Attack, by Haruki Murakami
Im still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question ht and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadnt been planning t it up--I had fotten all about it--but it wasnt one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.
What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two oclo the m. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at hirty, and goo sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overp hunger pangs.
Our refrigerator tained not a siem that could be teically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six s of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise jugal uanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.
I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doiarial work at a design school. I was either twe or twenty-nine--why t I remember the exact year we married?--and she was two years a months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.
We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. Oher hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kit, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?
We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked ihe tents never ged. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions iter, but there was no ce those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.
"Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?"
I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. "Lets get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant," I said. "There must be one on the highway."
She rejected that suggestion. "We t. Youre not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned in that way.
I breathed ond said, "I guess not."
Whenever my wife expressed su opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe thats what happens with newlyweds, I dont know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this ecial hunger, not ohat could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.
A special kind of hunger. And what might that be?
I present it here in the form of a ematic image.
One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet<tt>藏书网</tt> sea. Two, I look down, and ier, I see the peak of a volo thrusting up from the o floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the waters surface, but just how close I ot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance.
This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seds betweeime my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my "I guess not." Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, uo analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why--the almost grotesque iy of my hunger notwithstanding--I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration).
We did the only thing we could do: opehe beer. It was a lot better thaing those onions. She didnt like beer much, so we divided the s, two for her, four for me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kit shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up a package that had four butter cookies itom. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate two, sav every crumb.
It was no use. Upon this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a trace.
Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fishs gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer s. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turhe pages of yesterdays paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs oabletop.
"Ive never been this hungry in my whole life," she said. "I wonder if it has anything to do with being married."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe not."
While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the uer volo. The clarity of the o water all around the boat gave me an uled feeling, as if a holloened somewhere behind my solar plexus--a hermetically sealed cavern that had her entranor exit. Something about this weird sense of absehis sense of the existential reality of ence--resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This e between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me.
Which is when it occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of experience. My stomach had been just as empty then...When?...Oh, sure, that was--
"The time of the bakery attack," I heard myself saying.
"The bakery attack? What are you talking about?"
And so it started.
"I oacked a bakery. Long time ago. Not a big bakery. Not famous. The bread was nothing special. Not bad, either. One of those ordinary little neighborhood bakeries right in the middle of a block of shops. Some old guy ran it who did everything himself. Baked in the m, and when he sold out, he closed up for the day."
"If you were going to attack a bakery, why that one?"
"Well, there was no point in attag a big bakery. All we wanted was bread, not money. We were attackers, not robbers."
"We? Whos we?"
"My best friend back then. Ten years ago. We were so broke we couldnt buy toothpaste. Never had enough food. We did some pretty awful things to get our hands on food. The bakery attack was one."
"I do." She looked hard at me. Her eyes could have been searg for a faded star in the m sky. "Why didnt you get a job? You could have worked after school. That would have been easier than attag bakeries."
"We didnt want to work. We were absolutely clear on that."
"Well, youre w now, arent you?"
I nodded and sucked some more beer. Then I rubbed my eyes. A kind of beery mud had oozed into my brain and was struggling with hunger pangs.
"Times ge. People ge," I said. "Lets go back to bed. Weve got to get up early."
"Im not sleepy. I want you to tell me about the bakery attack."
"Theres nothing to tell. No a. ement."
"Was it a success?"
I gave up on sleep and ripped open another beer. Once she gets ied in a story, she has to hear it all the way through. Thats just the way she is.
"Well, it was kind of a success. And kind of not. We got what we wanted. But as a holdup, it didnt work. The baker gave us the bread before we could take it from him."
"Free?"
"ly, no. Thats the hard part." I shook my head. "The baker was a classical-music freak, and whe there, he was listening to an album of Wagner overtures. So he made us a deal. If we would listen to the record all the way through, we could take as much bread as we liked. I talked it over with my buddy and we figured, Okay. It wouldnt be work in the purest sense of the word, and it wouldnt hurt anybody. So we put our knives ba , pulled up a couple of chairs, and listeo the overtures to Tannhauser and The Flying Dut."
"And after that, you got your bread?"
&quht. Most of what he had in the shop. Stuffed it in and took it home. Kept us fed for maybe four or five days." I took another sip. Like soundless waves from an undersea earthquake, my sleepiness gave my boat a long, slow rog.
"Of course, we aplished our missio the bread. But you couldnt say we had itted a crime. It was more of an exge. We listeo Wagner with him, and iur our bread. Legally speaking, it was more like a ercial transa."
"But listening to Wagner is not work," she said.
"Oh, no, absolutely not. If the baker had insisted that we wash his dishes or his windows or something, we would have turned him down. But he didnt. All he wanted from us was to listen to his Wagner LP from beginning to end. Nobody could have anticipated that. I mean--Wagner? It was like the baker put a curse on us. Now that I think of it, we should have refused. We should have threatened him with our knives and taken the damn bread. Then there wouldnt have been any problem."
"You had a problem?"
I rubbed my eyes again.
"Sort of. Nothing you could put your finger on. But things started to ge after that. It was kind of a turning point. Like, I went back to the uy, and I graduated, and I started w for the firm and studying the bar exam, and I met you and got married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery attacks."
"Thats it?"
"Yup, thats all there was to it." I drank the last of the beer. Now all six s were gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.
Of course, it wasnt true that nothing had happened as a result of the bakery attack. There were plenty of things that you could have easily put your finger on, but I didnt want to talk about them with her.
"So, this friend of yours, whats he doing now?"
"I have no idea. Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, aopped hanging around together. I havent seen him since. I dont know what hes doing."
For awhile, she didnt speak. She probably sehat I wasnt tellihe whole story. But she wasnt ready to press me on it.
"Still," she said, "thats why you two broke up, isnt it? The bakery attack was the direct cause."
"Maybe so. I guess it was more intehaher of us realized. We talked about the relationship of bread to Wagner for days after that. We kept asking ourselves if we had made the right choice. We couldnt decide. Of course, if you look at it sensibly, we did make the right choiobody got hurt. Everybody got what he wahe baker--I still t figure out why he did what he did--but anyway, he succeeded with his Wagner propaganda. And we succeeded in stuffing our faces with bread.
"But even so, we had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting a dark shadow on our lives. Thats why I used the word curse. Its true. It was like a curse."
"Do you think you still have it?"
I took the six pull-tabs from the ashtray and arrahem into an aluminum ring the size of a bracelet.
"Who knows? I dont know. I bet the world is full of curses. Its hard to tell which curse makes any ohing g."
"Thats not true." She looked right at me. "You tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, itll stick with you like a toothache. Itll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too."
"You?"
"Well, Im your best friend now, arent I? Why do you think were both so hungry? I never, ever, on my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Dont you think its abnormal? Your curse is w ooo."
I hen I broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them ba the ashtray. I didnt know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto something.
The feeling of starvation was back, strohan ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of plicated maery.
I took another look at my undersea volo. The water was clearer than before--much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble otom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them.
"Weve only been living together for two weeks," she said, "but all this time Ive been feeling some kind of weird presence." She looked directly into my eyes and brought her hands together oabletop, her fingers interlog. "Of course, I didnt know it was a curse until now. This explains everything. Youre under a curse."
"What kind of presence?"
"Like theres this heavy, dusty curtain that hasnt been washed for years, hanging down from the ceiling."
"Maybe its not a curse. Maybe its just me," I said, and smiled.
She did not smile.
"No, its not you," she said.
"Okay, supposed youre right. Suppose it is a curse. What I do about it?"
"Attaother bakery. Right away. Now. Its the only way."
"Now?"
"Yes. Now. While youre still hungry. You have to finish what you left unfinished."
"But its the middle of the night. Would a bakery be open now?"
"Well find ookyos a big city. There must be at least one all-night bakery."
We got <big></big>into my old Corolla and started drifting around the streets of Tokyo at 2:30 a.m., looking for a bakery. There we were, me clutg the steering wheel, she in the navigators seat, the two of us sing the street like hungry eagles in search of prey. Stretched out on the backseat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wifes windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove partment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. her of us had ever skied. But she didnt explain and I didnt ask. Married life is weird, I felt.
Impeccably equipped, we were heless uo find an all-night bakery. I drove through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to Yosuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya. Late-night Tokyo had all kinds of people and shops, but no bakeries.
Twice we entered patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inspicuous. The other slowly overtook us and crept past, finally moving off into the distance. Both times I gre uhe arms, but my wifes tration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every time she shifted the angle of her body, the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow.
"Lets fet it," I said. "There arent any bakeries open at this time of night. Youve got to plan for this kind of thing or else--"
"Stop the car!"
I slammed on the brakes.
"This is the place," she said.
The shops along the street had their shutters rolled down, f dark, silent walls oher side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark lik<abbr>９9ｌiｂ?</abbr>e a twisted, chilling glass eye. There was a bright Malds hamburger sign some two hundred yards ahead, but nothing else.
"I dont see any bakery," I said.
Without a word, she opehe glove partment and pulled out a roll of cloth-backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out on my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered the numbers on the lise plate. Then she went around to the ba<footer>.99lib.</footer>d did the same. There racticed efficy to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her.
"Were going to take that Malds," she said, as coolly as if she were announg what we would have for dinner.
"Malds is not a bakery," I pointed out to her.
"Its like a bakery," she said. "Sometimes you have to promise. Lets go."
I drove to the Malds and parked i. She handed me the bla-ed shotgun.
"Ive never fired a gun in my life," I protested.
"You dont have to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as soon as they say, Wele to Malds, we slip on our masks. Got that<abbr>九九藏书</abbr>?"
"Sure, but--"
"Then you shove the gun in their faces and make all the workers and ers get together. Fast. Ill do the rest."
"But--"
"How many hamburgers do you think well hirty?"
"I guess so." With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the bla a little. The thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night.
"Do we really have to do this?" I asked, half to her and half to myself.
"Of course we do."
Wearing a Malds hat, the girl behind the ter flashed me a Malds smile and said, "Wele to Malds." I hadnt thought that girls would work at Malds late at night, so the sight of her fused me for a sed. But only for a sed. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. fronted with this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us.
Obviously, the Malds hospitality manual said nothing about how do deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that es after "Wele to Malds," but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldnt e out. Even so, like a crest moon in the dawn sky, the hint of a professional smile li the edges of her lips.
As quickly as I could manage, I uned the shotgun and aimed it in the dire of the tables, but the only ers there were a young couple--students, probably--and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned oable like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead. They didnt look likely to obstruct our operation, so I swung my shotgun back toward the ter.
All together, there were three Malds workers. The girl at the ter, the manager--a guy with a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties--and a student type i--a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could read as an expression. They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an In well. No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had to rest the barrel on top of the cash register, my finger origger.
"Ill give you the money," said the manager, his voice hoarse. "They collected it at eleven, so we dont have too much, but you have everything. Were insured."
"Lower the front shutter and turn off the sign," said my wife.
"Wait a minute," said the manager. "I t do that. Ill be held responsible if I close up without permission."
My wife repeated her order, slowly. He seemed torn.
"Youd better do what she says," I warned him.
He looked at the muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun. He finally resigned himself to the iable. He turned off the sign and hit a swit arical pahat lowered the shutter. I kept my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently Malds dont have burglar alarms. Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attae.
The front shutter made a huge racket when it closed, like ay bucket being smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their table was still out cold. Talk about a sound sleep: I hadnt seen anything like that in years.
"Thirty Big Macs. For takeout," said my wife.
"Let me just give you the money," pleaded the manager. "Ill give you more than you need. You go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my ats and--"
"Youd better do what she says," I said again.
The three of them went into the kit area together and started making the thirty Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them in buns, and the girl ed them up. Nobody said a word.
I leaned against a big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilli burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest ers, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, ging to its pink walls.
A pile of white-ed burgers was growing nearby. I wao grab and tear into them, but I could not be certain that su act would be sistent with our objective. I had to wait. I kit area, I started sweating under my ski mask.
The Malds people sneaked gla the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when Im nervous. Jabbing my finger into ahrough the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and down, which seemed to bother them. It couldnt have gone off actally, because I had the safety on, but they didnt know that and I wasnt about to tell them.
My wife ted the finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping bags, fifteen burgers to a bag.
"Why do you have to do this?" the girl asked me. "Why dont you just take the money and buy something you like? Whats the good of eating thirty Big Macs?"
I shook my head.
My wife explained, "Were sorry, really. But there werent any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery."
That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didnt ask any more questions. Then my wife ordered twe Cokes from the girl and paid for them.
"Were stealing bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a plicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She robably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.
My wife then pulled a ball of twine from her pocket--she came equipped--and tied the three to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wao go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I ed the gun in the bla, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The ers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?
We drove for a half hour, found ay parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Ma the back seat. Our huhat huhat had felt as if it could go on forever--vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the suhe buildings filthy walls purple and made a giant SOA ad tlow with painful iy. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The Ameri Armed Forces radio laying usic. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.
"Still was it really necessary for us. to do this?" I asked.
"Of course it was!" With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten.
Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volo was gohe waters calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves--like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze--lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else.
I stretched out itom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.
百度搜索 村上春树短篇集 天涯 或 村上春树短篇集 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.