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.
