Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

By Craig Mod

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Travel

In 2021, with Japan's borders closed during the pandemic, the photographer and essayist Craig Mod walked some three hundred miles along the Kumano Kodō pilgrimage routes of the Kii Peninsula, through villages that are steadily emptying. Conversations with aging fishermen, innkeepers, farmers and café owners mingle with memories of his childhood in a struggling Connecticut town, his life as an adoptee who moved to Japan at nineteen, and a close friend who was murdered. His own photographs accompany the text.

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• Tim Ferriss: “You also write beautifully. And I really want to encourage people to check out Things Become Other Things. I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg and the way you weave prose and sort of inject nostalgia and liminality and... the emotional experience of moving slowly and then historically flashback, moving quickly through the world. All of these things that you put into a beautiful tapestry of a reading experience, I really encourage people to check it out”