Things Become Other Things

A transformative 300-mile walk along Japans ancient pilgrimage routes and through depopulating villages inspires a heartrending remembrance of a long-lost friend, documented in poignant, imaginative prose and remarkable photography. Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japans borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodo routesthe ancient pilgrimage paths of Japans southern Kii Peninsulatook 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 youre 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 Mods unique bicultural lens.