Excellent Murakami story in current New Yorker

Hiruki Murakami's story in current New Yorker, Yesterday, is a return from the brink for him - it's far less fantastical or magical than some of his most recent short fiction - really on the surface at least just a straightforward recollection by the narrator of a friendship of his youth: narrator is a university student, later to become a writer, apparently much like Murakami himself, who befriends an intelligent but eccentric co-worker who is unable to pass his entrance exams to the university (cannot focus on his work) and has many odd, anti-social habits, most notably that he prefers to speak in a rough dialect, something he acquired like learning a foreign language (there's no obvious English counterpart but perhaps it would be like a Manhattanite affecting a harsh Brooklyn accent?) and he likes to engage the narrator in long conversations while he's soaking in a bathtub. Despite his oddities, he has a very beautiful and intelligent and lively girlfriend, but their relationship is on hold while she's in college; he decides, however, it would be good if she would date the narrator and sets up a meeting, which leads to some heartfelt discussions - in particular, her recounting of a dream in which the moon is made of ice, the most Murakimi-like moment in the story. Then story jumps forward many years to chance encounter of narrator and the girl, who fills him in on the peripatetic life of his old friend: all three of them have moved off in separate ways. This story very beautifully captures that feeling most adults have of these chance-encounter friendships of our youth that maybe should have become friendships, or loves, for life but that for inexplicable reasons broke apart. (Many get reconnected, at least superficially, thru social media.) The title on the surface refers to the friend's propensity to write absurd lyrics to popular songs such as this one; on a deeper level, it nicely captures the reflective mood of the story, not in search of lost time but recognizing that it's almost random why some elements of our past are lost and others grow to become central to our adult lives - yet all play a role, all of these encounters help define who we are and what we have become.