An excellent story from Murakami on young love, music, and memory

I've been a big fan of Haruki Murakami for many years, beginning w/ his early work, A Wild Sheep Chase, and forward w/ his short stories in particular, though I have noticed w/ some distress that in recent years his stories have become increasingly mannered, drawing from the same sample drawer or tropes and conventions: cats, characters who disappear, ear fetishes, devotion to American jazz and coffee bars, spaghetti, distance running. I'm pleased to see that his story in current New Yorker, With the Beatles, draws on some of the familiar Murakami themes but unlike many other recent stories it has a real sense of mystery, loss, and nostalgia, a real fine piece of writing that stands up along side anything he's done before, in my view. The story begins w/ the narrator's odd but trenchant observation that, now in his 70s (like Murakami - giving the story the feeling of a memoir/essay/auto fiction, at least up to a point) senses that he has not grown older but that all of his h.s. classmates and friends have aged. Who in his/her 70s hasn't thought that, without exactly articulating the thought? He then recollects a vision of a beautiful young woman in his h.s. dashing through the hallway carrying the eponymous Beatles LP, and this image has stayed w/ him for many years, even though he, oddly, never saw this beautiful fellow student again; this, too, is a feeling that many of us of his age have about youth - a flash or a vision of a moment of beauty that stays w/ us mysteriously then, and over the years. He also quite accurately describes how the amazing success of the Beatles in the mid-1960s changed the course of popular culture and was more or less the soundtrack that accompanied our first attempts at mature (barely) love; this clearly is something that everyone in his/my generation can recognize and attest to (other generations of course have their own "theme" music, but the Beatles almost stand alone in this because of their international celebrity plus their musical originality). He then segues into a narrative about his first love/h.s. girlfriend (not a fan of the Beatles, as it happens) - some beautiful and thoughtful writing here that all can recognize as the narrative of a first, awkward attempt at and experience of love - loves that inevitably vanish, but that stay w/ us for a lifetime, I hope in most cases as a positive relationship, even if tinged with guilt and shame at times (unlike his, my h.s. girlfriend has gone on to live a happy and fulfilling life, I'm very glad to say). The heart of the story is his awkward encounter w/ the girlfriend's older brother, clearly a very disturbed, even scary, young man (sibling issues almost always play a key role in the development or dissolution of "first loves"); to his credit; Murakami avoids the obvious and melodramatic resolution of the plot - the older brother, for all of his ominous behavior, does nothing violent - and then concludes w/ a much later in life encounter, sad and mysterious and strangely believable. I would hope all readers could identify w/ and learn from this story, but it will have particular resonance, I think, to those of us in Murakami's age cohort (and there's not much contemporary fiction about which this can be said).