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.

But as sick and cruel as the outcome is, it's a better world. If you want to talk about what's right, imagine we did have someone keeping us accountable (maybe not pale tweens dropping arsenic in our tea) but someone grabbing you by your face and shaking you awake every time you betray yourself, every time you stray from what you're here to do. There's the order.

Small note on style (for my translation): it was like Fitzgerald in its descriptions (there's also a little green light motif going on). Other paragraphs remind me of the end of Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, maybe the best scene when the sea lapping up and almost consuming the Ethan Allen, etc. Though in a lot of ways they're opposite books. At its most beautiful you get glimpses of Melville.