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 happened to me with Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a very talented, absorbing, 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 fingers typing out one day at work, risking my job, eyesight and circulation for the sake of e-mailing it to three ingrates whose puzzled, lackluster reactions made them unworthy of my suffering. (I mean, I was also really bored and, in retrospect, 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 searching for some electronic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain.
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The Second 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 of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can 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 to bring it up--I had forgotten 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 oclock in the morning. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and gone to 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, overpowering hunger pangs.
Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans 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 conjugal understanding 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 doing secretarial work at a design school. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine--why cant I remember the exact year we married?--and she was two years and eight 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. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kitchen, 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 inside, the contents never changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter, but there was no chance 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 cant. Youre not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned in that way.
I breathed once and said, "I guess not."
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