The Second Bakery Attack-09/19/08.

"Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation.  Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know.  But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that 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 can present it here in the form of a cinematic image.

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea.  Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor.  Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell.  Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance."

This passage establishes the relationship between husband and wife.  The reader understands that the wife is the higher authority of the two through Murakami's use of syntax and connotation.  Murakami's use of parentheses in the line segment, "an opinion (or thesis)" is so odd syntactically that it draws the reader's attention.  We notice that the first word "an opinion" has a rather neutral connotation while the word "thesis" has a more authoritative connotation.  In the way that the word is enveloped in parenthesis, it makes me think of a resigned concession.  It is almost as if he realizes the word, "opinion" does not accurately encapsulate her superiority and decides to throw the second word in there.  This is supported by a second use of this structure later on in the story.  

Next, we have the metaphor Murakami draws between hunger and the act of sitting in a boat and seeing a volcano whose distance cannot be determined due to the hypertransparency of the water.  I thought this was a ridiculous metaphor.  The two compared states seem to have no similarities whatsoever.  However this motif of sitting in a boat is constantly being brought up through references of "mermaids," "dead fish," and "waves."  It seemed improbable to me that such a frequently reoccurring motif and even the entire short story were really about something as trivial as hunger.  Instead I saw the metaphor as a representation of married life.  The volcano was a symbol of the couple's individual pasts unknown to each other.  The ominous presence of a volcano is similar to the way the protagonist's past (attacking a bakery) seems capable of harming the couple's relationship.  The possibility of this happening, however, is difficult to determine because of the state of being newlyweds.  The two do not yet know each other completely, and the protagonist is probably uncertain about how his wife will react.

However, trying to fit this metaphor around my idea was still a bit of a stretch.  I'm not really certain at all about what the man is trying to say to me.

p.s. Is my analysis too long? The directions say to write about 50-100 words, but I didn't know if this was absolute.