Craig Mod

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.

A Walking Memoir

Things Become Other Things

Manu

The dumbest looking bird ran straight into a bush

Claudine

I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of the solar walks. There is no quieter place on earth and the third hour of a long day of walking. It’s this pace, this walk hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities for the world. If that sounds like woo-woo  nonsense, it feels even more woo-woo to experience.

Had someone told us back then that the key to it all lay in deliberate repetition, we would have never believed them. Told them to f’ off. We knew better, always knew better. (And we did, in a way.) But it’s true. Damn, it’s true: I’ve come to realize that the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn’t enough. That’s why I’m back.

I think of the people who died making this place habitable. Boiling, chopping through the verdant forest – thick, lush, unyielding – homesteading, carving rice plots out of mountainsides, building all those drystone walls to keep out the boar and deer. Now dead, those people. I passed them each day on the walk. Ashes in cemeteries they themselves hacked into rock.

Not sure why writing like this always gets me :))

Before I can register what he said, he continues with more fluency: she just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a  job, somehow… found us. Not a daughter, but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become… other things.

A prayer at a Shinto shrine is more "hello" than "help." The help being implied through greeting, from simply letting the kami know you're here, putting your very existence on the radar of these local deities. Inside the shrines themselves-through windows and doorways-you catch glimpses of priests in crisp white robes as they shuffle about in the background, carry branches, objects. Deep within, the shrines hold ancient metal mirrors covering nagi bayberry leaves, small meals of rice for those unknowable, unseeable kami.

Me thinking: I wish I wrote like this guy

Do Japanese people say "ain't"? They do to my ears. Language grounds abstraction, impulse, conceit. It's the form we give to such shapeless things, to the cascading tides of our mind. So while there might not be an explicit "ain't" in Japanese itself, within the Kii Peninsula there is the vibe of "ain't" and the intention of "ain't" and the chemical swirl of "ain't" in how the folks intone, and I try to bring that to these pages.

Which is why I probably spent so much time walking the city. The house was a bit nuts. The backstreets and alleys of Tokyo healed me with their relative sanity. I was drawn to Shinjuku again and again because I felt a kinship. If our kind roamed this city, this is where they'd be. The one place in Tokyo where all social strata brushed shoulders beneath Jumbotrons and blinking neon.

Language as a mechanism of self-binding. Language used when you feel a scarcity-of opportunity and resources. If I can't get out of this mess, no way I'm letting you get out, either. That's what these words signify, I see this now. A tribal language of scarcity that when spoken out loud makes the scarcity more and more real. True to their name: curses.

The public bath demystifies. Any weirdness we may have felt about our own nakedness could have been so easily and readily erased with a single communal dunk. Think you have weird balls? Think again. Now we know how big balls can get, and how even if they get that big, looking like they've rotted in place, a man can still walk freely, nakedly, showing off his unique testicularity to other farmers with no trace of shame, dipping his sacks of coal into the steaming waters, consecrated to the kami of the bath, letting out a big sigh.

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