When five containers washed ashore on the western coast of Jutland, Denmark, it was a miniscule event. Yet that event is indicative of the ways in which the world-system of commodity capitalism based on resource extractivism has increasingly exposed the Global North to environmental wrought. Connecting the event in Denmark to The Man with the Compound Eye, a 2011 novel by Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, shows literature’s ability to uncover the frailty of the idea of containerization and of enclosing and compartmentalizing the effects of extractivism.