One of those books where you put it down and feel like completely useless, like you've just had both arms removed, but then, after an hour on the shower floor, an order emerges through the steam and there's a real poignant beauty in what I found. You still won't feel good but you'll probably feel something.

The story, which is important, goes like this: the sailor, Kyuji, is really giving it to this kid's mom, and the kid quickly sees the sailor as a hero. Some psychological questions there I'll leave unaddressed. The sailor dreams he'll be a hero at sea, dreams of destiny, etc. But he settles down and for that reason the kid and his friends basically take him out, in a really sadistic way. Super depressing.

But at it's core, what we have here is a hero, who betrays his destiny and himself, and is punished for it. So on its face, the theme could be something like “don’t sell out your values” but there’s more to it — there’s the satanic violence of amoral youth — and the striving for a deeper world, beyond ours, as in Yeats' The Shadowy Waters or The Ninth Gate (1999). "The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was 'beyond', wrong or right, had always been 'beyond'." And the whole time I'm reading this I just have Rockwell Kent prints flashing in my head.