What is Haruki Murakami's "The Second Bakery Attack" about?

One technique Haruki Murakami often employs in his short stories is to directly state the primary themes early on or at the end of the work. He does this in order to create a fable-like quality in his stories, a feeling of "this is what I learned, now sit back and let me tell you how I learned that lesson," so to speak. In "The Second Bakery Attack," Murakami places the story's theme in the opening paragraph when the narrator says:

[W]rong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in face we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

Throughout this story, the narrator attempts to explain how the events that unfold, the gunpoint robbery of a McDonald's in Tokyo, happened outside of his control. He begins the story explaining the unquenchable hunger he and his wife had been suffering from just weeks after they married. The narrator tells his wife he had felt hunger like this before, when he "attacked" a bakery with his friend.

It is during the first bakery attack that the narrator seems to place the blame for everything else on fate. During this attack, the narrator and his best friend make a Faustian deal with the bakery store owner in which he would let them take as much bread as they would like, if they listened to music from two operas by Wagner. The narrator then explains "[i]t was like the baker put a curse on us." The narrator explains to his wife that he and his best friend drifted apart after the bakery attack, but she insists the curse has been transferred to her and that "[i]t'll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too."

While the narrator seems to believe fate plays the primary role in his life, his wife does not seem to hold the same belief. She believes in the curse the bakery store owner placed on the narrator, but she rejects the idea that they cannot do anything about it. So she tells the narrator they must complete a second bakery attack to break the curse. The pair drives all night before finally settling on a McDonald's where they use the wife's shotgun— perhaps symbolic of her willingness to take action—to rob the restaurant of twenty Big Macs.

At the end, the narrator and his wife still seem to be stuck in their worldviews with her insisting that the robbery absolutely had to be done, but the narrator waiting for his metaphorical boat "to carry me where I belonged."