Short-a-Day: Haruki Murakami's "U.F.O. In Kushiro"
Originally published in The New Yorker, Mar. 19, 2001. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 8.[Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.] A bit of an opportunistic reprint, here, by The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman, an openly empty story (though I feel -- or rather don't feel -- that about most of Murakami's writing) that just happens to be loosely related to the 1995 earthquake that hit Kobe, J…