Comparing Murakami's recent story with one of his classics

To follow up on yesterday's post, I re-read a Haruki Murakami story from the '80s (I think), The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women, opening story in his first collection (in English tr.), The Elephant Vanishes, and maybe not a fair example in that it was obviously incorporated into his famous novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicles (not sure whether he wrote it as a story or if it appeared as a story when in fact it was an excerpt from a larger work). In any event, we can see, looking back at this story, how HM's style has changed and not entirely for the better. Some notes of comparison: with his most recent story to appear in English, The Wind Cave: Windup Bird clearly gives much more presence to the narrator, who actually does things and experiences things over the course of the story, whereas  the Wind Cave narrator just reflects on a key event in his life; there is nothing at the end of Wind Cave that the narrator would not have known or could not have said at the outset, and as a result we feel far less engaged w/ the narrator of Wind Cave. Note that the narrator if Wind-up immediately establishes a specific cultural mood: In the first sentence, the narrator says he was interrupted by cooking spaghetti and listening to a Rossini opera prelude (and a somewhat obscure one at that), so we immediately see this narrator as cosmopolitan and international - attuned to the fascination with Western culture and cuisine and, later commercial products (cigarette brands, fast food) of the West. The narrator of Wind-up has several mysterious, even troubling, encounters w/ women (see title) that leave us uneasy and remain unresolved at the end. The story also touches on a perennial HM theme: cats. In fact that's the central dynamic of the story: The narrator, on request of his wife, spends much of the day in search of their missing cat, which leads him to an abandoned and backyard of a neighboring house. He never finds the cat, so the story (or excerpt) remains unresolved, whereas Wind Cave is resolved, closed at the end - though the closure entails only the narrator's articulation of his thoughts about the death of his younger sister. We either accept his supposition - that has sister died in the eponymous cave, several years before her actual, recognized death - or not, whereas in Windup we obviously accept the narrator's account of events though there are many aspects of these events - who keeps calling him on the phone and why? who is the young girl who hangs out in the overgrown, neglected back yard? what will happen in the narrator's uneasy marriage? - that remain open and inviting. Which story is better?