A younger man's journey, as it is portrayed in this impressive atmospheric debut film, is not so much a literal quest to find guidance from his grandfather whose name he bears as a spiritual quest to find himself in the foreign landscape his ancestor had apparently wandered across. (That Japanese soldier appears to have survived a plane crash in Indonesia when he was on his way to Pearl Harbor.) The fact that he never finds what he is looking for, and is himself never found again, is relevant to a reading of one of the more peculiar scenes in the film, in which the younger Yasujiro meticulously stacks and balances a series of stones on a large rock, hears a whisper of dissatisfaction that he obviously shares, knocks the pillar over and then rebuilds. The unplotted film that shows a young man examining the stark, rocky, eroded terrain he travels across, helps viewers reflect on what goes into crafting a balanced and satisfying non-narrative film, and makes us think about Rizal's homeland before it became familiar and urbanized. Young Yasujiro is not getting somewhere but undertaking a personal journey of transformation, discovering his connections to the past, and feeling the winds of time.