Murakami establishes a mood and a tone, but to what end?

Haruki Murakami has had a long, successful career, writing novels that mix hyper-realism (life in contemporary Tokyo) with surrealism - voices from the dead, characters with strange powers of perception, alternate universes, a certain obsession with cats - to great effect. I was a huge fan of his early works, in particular the first I read, A Wild Sheep Chase, and his early stories; I have not read all of his recent works and had begun to find his style mannered and on the edge of predictable. His story in the current New Yorker, The Wind Cave, is a good example of how he establishes a tone or a mood: The story is narrated by a young man who recalls the death of his sister in their childhood, when she was about 12 and he 15; the family had known she had a heart condition, but she seems to have managed well with minimal treatment until one day on the way to school she fell dead of heart failure at a train station. The narrator mourns her and has a particularly strong reaction to the thought of her confined in a coffin and to her cremation - a reaction that disturbed his well-being for years. He reflects on an incident in their earlier youth - when she was about 10 - and, with their uncle, they visited a cave near Mount Fuji. The 2 children entered the cave while the uncle rested outside; at one point the sister enters a tiny side cave; she doesn't emerge for some time and does not respond to her brother's calls, sending him - of course - into a near panic. When she does emerge she describes to him - in language that sounds much more like Murakami than like any 10-year-old - how the cave was so dark and silent that she last all sense of her own consciousness and physical presence. Years later, the narrator reflects that perhaps she died in that cave, and was given a period of grace in which her body could carry on w/ a shadow of life for a few more years. That's it. Yes, maybe that happened - but why and to what end? Is this a piece of a longer work? Somehow, I don't think so. I love and appreciate the efficiency of short stories, the best of which contain within their constricted form all of the richness and plenitude of a novel - but by suggestion and inference only. But this story, in the end, contains less than it seems: Either you buy into the young man's supposition or not, but even if you do, what's the point.The story has no point of reference beyond itself.