Things Become Other Things (2025)
A memoir of walking Japan
Craig Mod
What Others Are Saying About TBOT
— David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas“Luminous, poignant, unflinching and kind, THINGS BECOME OTHER THINGS reads like a future classic of its genre.”
— William Gibson, author of Neuromancer“Mod takes the reader along on an epic, exquisitely detailed journey, on foot, through a rural Japan few of us are likely to experience. Uniquely unforgettable.”
— Publishers Weekly Starred Review"Mod delivers a gorgeous account of his 300-mile walk around Japan’s Kii peninsula in 2021 … While passing through Ise Grand Shrine and a series of fishing villages, Mod discusses crumbling economies and extreme weather with locals who’ve lived in the region for decades.
Punctuated with stunning black and white photographs of the villages and landscapes Mod encountered, this tender exploration of fragile ecosystems and vanishing ways of life will encourage readers to look more closely at their own surroundings. It’s a nourishing trek."
— Robin Sloan, bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Sourdough, Moonbound“From its first pages, Things Become Other Things vibrates with energy — a calm charisma. The steady pad of feet on pavement (and wet dirt, and old stones) becomes a backbeat for histories personal and global, observations tiny and profound. Craig Mod's memoir is the quiet road, set one back from the busy artery, that calls to you — maybe there's something interesting that way? Oh boy is there. You'll be glad you took this path.”
— W. David Marx, author of Ametora and Status and Culture"Mod's highly readable chronicle of a secular pilgrimage through Japan's vanishing rural towns breathes new life into the travelogue while shining a light on the dire need for solace among all who have suffered through the trauma of American violence and social fracture."
— Dexter Thomas, journalist and documentary film maker"Craig points his viewfinder at rural Japan, but what develops is a snapshot of the slow, faceless violence that produced so many of us."
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review“A meditative travelogue through a part of Japan few outsiders ever see … [Mod’s] account reaches far beyond private reminiscence to become an exemplary travel narrative, instructive and entertaining. Elegant and inspired: just the thing to read along with Basho and other pilgrims into Japan’s back country.”
— Aziz Ansari, director, actor, stand-up dingaling, pizzaiolo supreme“An achingly real portrait of friendship in small town America — seen through the lens of Japan — that will ring true to many. It is nature, memory, heartbreak, and at its core, an ode to the beauty and wonder contained in everything, and the patience to find it. Through Mod’s guidance you take it all in — from freshwater mountain crabs scrambling on a log to a rural metal worker with a secret stash of meticulously crafted tiny iron frogs. Memoir, travelogue, photo book — this piece is a walk itself and one well worth taking.”
— Alec Soth, contemporary photographer, meditator“I felt like I was in Craig Mod’s head as he ambled around Japan. Along with giving me comfort, his calm and honest voice imparted wisdom. This book made me want to go for a long walk and learn to listen to my own inner voice.”
About the Book
A transformative 300-mile walk along Japan’s ancient pilgrimage routes and through depopulating villages inspires a heart-rending remembrance of a long-lost friend, documented alongside remarkable photographs.
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. While passing the peninsula’s shrinking villages, Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan as a student at age nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. As the days passed, he considered why he has walked so rigorously and religiously during his twenty-five years as an immigrant in Japan, contemplating the power of walking itself. For Mod, solo walks are a tool to change the very structure of his mind, to better himself, and to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
Through the frame of a 300-mile-long pilgrimage walk, 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 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 only made visible through Mod’s unique bicultural lens.