A KIRKUS REVIEWS AND SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A transformative 300-mile walk
along Japan’s ancient pilgrimage routes and through depopulating villages inspires a
heartrending remembrance of a long-lost friend documented in poignant imaginative prose and
remarkable photography. “An epic exquisitely detailed journey on foot through a rural
Japan few of us are likely to experience. Uniquely unforgettable.” — William Gibson New York
Times bestselling author of Neuromancer Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of
long solo walks. But in 2021 during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders one particular
walk around the Kumano Kodō routes—the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii
Peninsula—took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. Mod found himself reflecting on
his own childhood in a post-industrial American town his experiences as an adoptee his
unlikely relocation to Japan at nineteen and his relationship with one lost friend whose life
was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. For Mod the walk became a tool to bear
witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left
are long.” Tracing a 300-mile-long journey Things Become Other Things folds together history
literature poetry Shinto and Buddhist spirituality and contemporary rural life in Japan via
dozens of conversations with aging fishermen multi-generational inn owners farmers and
kissaten cafe “mamas.” Along the way Mod communes with mountain fauna marvels over evidence
of bears and boars and hopscotches around leeches. He encounters whispering priests and
foul-mouthed little kids who ask him “Just what the heck are you anyway?” Through sharp prose
and his curious archive of photographs he records evidence of floods and tsunamis the
disappearance of village life on the peninsula and the capricious fecundity of nature.
Things Become Other Things blends memoir and travel writing at their best transporting readers
to an otherwise inaccessible Japan one made visible only through Mod’s unique bicultural lens.
