The Motif of Hunger in Murakami

When Gregory Samsa first wakes up in his new-found dimension in the beginning of  “Samsa in Love”, it takes him some time to process the transformation he had undergone and the changes his body had experienced. After getting relatively accustomed to this new form of mobility, he is hit with a wave of “excruciating pain” (188) which he soon realizes to be hunger. Despite the incredible discomfort it brings him, Samsa forces himself to get up from the bed because he feels that if he does not eat he will “cease to exist” (190). The unbearable hunger pushes Samsa to discover his new surroundings and attempt to coexist with them. Like a toddler, or rather a new-born animal, Samsa stumbles through the first steps of life such as learning how to walk and use his extremities. When Samsa finally discovers food in the apartment, he quickly consumes it while disregarding even the taste because “what mattered was filling that empty cavern inside him” (192). This description reminded me of a scene in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away when Chihiro’s parents discover delicious-looking food in the abandoned park and immediately start to devour it. Unable to stop eating, the couple suddenly metamorphoses into pigs. Eating as a means of filling an emptiness (both metaphorical and literal), appears frequently in Murakami. “The Second Bakery Attack” centers on the couple’s shared ‘curse’ which they discover due to an insatiable feeling of hunger which wakes them up in the middle of the night. The hunger these characters experience is agonizing and unsettling yet it seems to always motivate some sort of resolve: Samsa is forced to learn how to live in his new body and to explore the world he’s found himself in; similarly, the hunger ultimately brings the couple closer together after getting rid of the ‘curse’. I think Murakami may be suggesting that humans experience two kinds of hunger both of which motivate them towards survival: the physical primal instinct and the metaphysical one. The latter, I think, has something to do with the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural evolution that humans inevitably go through and the constant search for an unattainable knowledge which can sometimes feel simultaneously subtle yet piercing.  

Ruska