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Book Summary and Reviews of Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

Things Become Other Things

A Walking Memoir

by Craig Mod

  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Published:
  • May 2025, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Gorgeous ... 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." —Publishers Weekly (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." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

> "Things Become Other Things is powered by Craig Mod's curiosity and thoughtfulness and takes you on a transportive journey through the depths of a rural Japan few of us shall ever see. It's also an achingly real portrait of friendship in small-town America 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." —Aziz Ansari, author of Modern Romance

"Luminous, poignant, unflinching and kind, Things Become Other Things reads like a future classic of its genre." —David Mitchell, New York Times bestselling author of Cloud Atlas

This information about Things Become Other Things was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Craig Mod

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of four books, including Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He is also the author of the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other publications.

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