When I set out, I didn't intend to make Yoh seem as if it were God, but that's kind of the direction the story took as I composed it. I think my best understanding of the story (not to be confused with my personal views) is that the universe is a godless place--at least in the any sense that humans might comprehend such a being.

Sure, we could take Spinoza's view of all existence as interdependent and derivative of God, or we could take the Deists' watchmaker analogy, or we could even mix in Schopenhauer's understanding of the world as we know it as an extension of will, or perhaps we could go back to Kant's understanding of the underlying thing-in-itself, which is simply inaccessible to human understanding, although we have plenty of gnoseological metaphors (as @f3nix pointed out) for trying to apprehend the thing-in-itself.

Something in that mix would help ground Ethan's universe in my rendering. The point is that when humans even graze nearby to a manifestation of the thing-in-itself, all human conceptions and comprehensions of the universe disappear, and that thing-in-itself, even if it's just the true form of a broom or crushed soda can, may as well be God. I think that if such a thing were permitted to somehow tear into the human world, it would so upend space-time to the point of irrelevancy, and all our stories, all our knowledge, all our beliefs would be so reconfigured to the point that, from our current perspective, they would be rendered meaningless.

So I guess I'm suggesting we go worship the incomprehensible depths and infinitudes of discarded brooms now? :)