4 ideas
On the Pacific island of Wayo Wayo, every second son must sail away at coming of age and never return. Atile'i sets out as custom demands, but instead of dying at sea he washes onto a vast floating island of plastic garbage, lives on it, and drifts to Taiwan's east coast.
Wayo Wayo's rule that second sons must go to sea is a population-control mechanism for a small island with fixed resources, but it is imposed as sacred law rather than argued as arithmetic. Framing the limit as the gods' will makes it enforceable and unquestionable. It also hides its human cost, and exported that cost is what finally surfaces on another shore.
The man with compound eyes sees every event through thousands of facets at once. He tells the dying Thom that he can only observe, not save. The lens separates seeing a catastrophe completely from being able to stop it: perfect awareness of ecological loss does not in itself confer any power to prevent it.
Garbage thrown into the ocean does not disappear. Currents gather it into a gyre that eventually drives it back onto inhabited coasts. The novel pairs this with Alice's private denial, in which she keeps imagining her son alive long after his death, to argue that what individuals and societies refuse to face does not dissolve but accumulates until it comes back as a disaster.