Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2: a surreal graphic novel mirror

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s best-selling, living author. His books have been translated into over 50 languages, with millions of copies sold worldwide. Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2: The Second Bakery Attack, Samsa in Love, Thailand are a curious itch. The three short stories in graphic novel form are jarring, visceral, in your face and take a moment to be absorbed. This is a graphic novel in the vein of art, with a surreal story that weaves between metaphors, allegory and absurdity without any warning.

Are the characters imagining it? What is the greater lesson that the author is trying to parlay in The Second Bakery Attack? Is Samsa in Love about an outer-space alien coming to terms with their body, a person struggling with mental illness or simply an eclectic man with a woman who fixes things? Even if you don’t understand the stories in Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2 you’ll come away from the book thinking.

It almost comes down to going to an art exhibit that you don’t immediately grasp. Your friends might walk away from it raving about the insightful applications of this or that, while you either nod your head in faux agreement or ask them if you attended the same event. Both of you had an opinion about the exhibit, but you’ll never know, or possibly care, which one of you is correct. My opinion about Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2 was like that circular process.

“What did I just read?”, was what I asked myself after reading it the first time. The art in the manga is rugged, exaggerated, and somewhere between a more realistic Ren & Stimpy and a painted graphic novel that your high-brow friends read. That’s how I’d describe The Second Bakery Attack. The best way to describe the other stories differ from that, but that’s the joy and experience of the book as a whole.

We are not used to manga. We are not that artsy. We are capable of latching onto metaphors, dream sequences and absurd logic, but weren’t initially prepared for the jarring art that is used in tandem with stories presented in that manner. Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is for audiences 13 and older due that arty element and the fact that the book features several illustrations of naked men and women.

Bakery Attack opens with a solitary man adrift in a row boat with no land near him. He’s questioning his life’s decisions and their morality of them when he sees himself in a run-down apartment with his wife. The two of them are complaining about how hungry they are when he suggests that their bad luck might have something to do with the bakery attack. He goes on to tell the story about how he and a friend robbed a bakery many years ago. They didn’t do it by force because the owner of the bakery said that they could have all the bread they wanted if the two would sit down and listen to an album of Wagner Overtures.

The two listen to the classical compositions and take all the bread that they could carry, but their lives haven’t been the same since. Although the two have drifted apart, the man’s life, and even his wife’s, has turned sour. Since it all started with robbing a bakery, the two decide that they can break the curse by robbing another one, thus the title of the short story. However, the two can’t find a bakery that’s open, so they opt for a McDonalds, but does that even count as a bakery? With their bounty of Big Macs in their car the two fall asleep in their car as they share a cigarette. The final page shows the man relaxing in the small boat he was in when the short story started.

If this were a short movie it would be directed by Quentin Tarantino. One could also see it being a dream sequence from Homer Simpson, albeit a longer and more detailed episode than he normally has. Is the story about robbing a bakery all happen in the man’s head or was he simply flashing back to a previous time? And if that’s the case, then the time after the second bakery attack must’ve had something drastic happen in order to put him on a boat far away from land. I want to know because this dude has lived an amazing, bizarre live and wacky things like that happen to me too.

There are no easy stories in Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2. Each one is not easy to explain and takes a twisted sense of storytelling and a patient mind to comprehend them initially.  Once you read one and think about it, then you’re able to dig into another manga story and make it work. After viewing the book through that lens I knew the woman in Thailand and her medical quest weren’t really the main targets of the story. It was the curiously complex taxi driver who worked with her during the vacation, and the intricate details that made it fascinating. Once you understand how his stories take shape you’re able to enjoy them more. Much in the way that after you’d seen an episode of Seinfeld or read a cartoon from The Far Side you were able to ‘get it’, you’ll need a moment for Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2. But, you’ll quickly ‘get it’ and then seek out Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 1 and 2.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2: The Second Bakery Attack, Samsa in Love, Thailand are adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney with illustrations by PMGL and available on Tuttle Publishing.

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