A work dealing with the American Army of Occupation in Korea during the early post-war years, the novel examines the nature of the relationships between the West and the of seeing as their differences occur in two divergent cultures. The aggressive nature of the West's sense of choice-in-action is shown on every hand to be in conflict with the East's sense of being, a sense of passivity which appears to be more closely in touch with the laws of human growth as these laws are operative in the universe. In developing this theme through the conflict between two cultures, two different approaches to the nature of reality itself begin to emerge.