The Japanese Sandman

Both wry travelogue and heartbreaking tale of love lost, The Japanese Sandman adapts a letter William S. Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1953. Told in Burroughs’ caustically funny voice, cocaine snorting in Panama and post-prom handjobs in 1931 St. Louis dissolve into a meditation on memory and artist John Fleck leads a stand-out cast through Burroughs’ recounting of scoring opiates, whores and boys in Panama and, in the letter’s P.S., a love affair with farm boy Billy Brandshin