UFO in Kushiro

"UFO in Kushiro" by Haruki Murakami puzzled me. It's unlike any of the short stories we have read in this course so far and seems irrelevant to the supernatural. Komura, recently divorced, takes a week off from work to travel to Hokkaido/Kushiro, partly to get away from his divorce and partly to deliver a friend's package. The contents of this short story is very realistic and seems to be a simple excerpt from an ordinary man's life. I can't place what exactly Murakami's intentions are with this story, but I can guess that he is trying to emphasize how short and fleeting life is. His compilation of short stories in After the Quake are all tied to the 1995 Kobe earthquakes in Japan, and "UFO in Kushiro" cements how simple events can change the entire course of our lives, such as the divorce and one quotation from Shimao that stuck to me: "think about it: tomorrow there could be an earthquake; you could be kidnapped by aliens; you could be eaten by a bear. Nobody knows what's going to happen" (Murakami 20).