Quick Take
- Narration: Craig Mod reads his own prose with the measured pace of a long-distance walker, and the result is one of the more seamlessly narrated travel memoirs in recent years.
- Themes: Grief and friendship, rural Japan’s depopulation, walking as a practice of witness
- Mood: Contemplative and quietly devastating, deeply unhurried
- Verdict: A rare audiobook that earns its description as literary travel writing, dense with beauty and loss in equal measure.
I was halfway through a late evening walk of my own, earbuds in, when Craig Mod started describing the sound of rain on the ancient cedar forests of Japan’s Kii Peninsula, and I had to stop moving. There is something slightly absurd about listening to a book about a 300-mile walk while walking, but it felt right for this one. Things Become Other Things is the kind of writing that asks something from you: attention, stillness, the willingness to slow down to the pace of someone’s feet on a gravel path.
Mod is a photographer and essayist who has spent years walking Japan’s rural routes and writing about what he finds there, for a newsletter community that has followed his work for a long time. This book grew out of a 2021 walk along the Kumano Kodo, the ancient pilgrimage paths of the Kii Peninsula, taken during the pandemic when Japan’s borders were closed and the landscape felt more unpeopled than usual. What started as a physical undertaking became, in ways that Mod could not have fully planned, a reckoning with a lost friend whose life had ended before their paths could reconverge.
The Walk That Becomes a Reckoning
The structural conceit of the book is elegant without being showy. Mod traces the physical journey in the present tense, folding in his own history, his childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experience as an adoptee, his unlikely arrival in Japan at nineteen, and his relationship with the friend whose death haunts the later sections. That grief is not announced loudly. It accumulates the way distance accumulates on a long walk, almost imperceptibly, until you realize how far you have come from where you started.
Reviewer Amanda wrote that she wanted to reread it immediately upon finishing, and a second reviewer quoted another reader’s description of the writing as evocative but playful, factual yet abstract, subtle yet poignant. That double register is exactly right. Mod is funny when he needs to be, precise when precision serves, and willing to let a sentence dissolve into something like poetry when the landscape demands it.
The Japan That Does Not Make Travel Brochures
What makes Things Become Other Things unusual as a travel book is its sustained attention to rural Japan’s disappearance. The peninsula Mod walks is depopulating. The aging fishermen, the multi-generational inn keepers, the kissaten cafe owners who have been making the same coffee for forty years, all of them are figures in a landscape that will not survive another generation unchanged. Mod documents floods and tsunamis, villages with more bears than young residents, roadside markers for communities that have already ceased to exist.
This is the Japan that William Gibson, who called the book uniquely unforgettable, was likely thinking of when he praised it. It is not the Japan of shrine-hopping itineraries or bullet train efficiency. It is a Japan accessible only on foot, at the pace Mod establishes, through conversations conducted in imperfect Japanese with people who have largely stopped expecting visitors.
What Narration Adds
Mod’s self-narration is an asset throughout. His voice is quiet and direct, and his pacing matches the prose. Reviewer Scott Kuffel noted feeling transported to the Kii Peninsula, which is partly the writing and partly the delivery. The downloadable PDF included with the audio contains photographs, and they are worth accessing. Mod is a photographer, and the images are integral to the project in ways that the text gestures toward but cannot fully contain. The audiobook is a complete experience without them, but the photographs add a dimension that matters.
The only friction I found was in some of the more technical passages about Shinto and Buddhist geography, where the density of proper nouns and historical references moved quickly in audio without the visual anchor of a map. A listener with some prior familiarity with Japanese pilgrimage culture will navigate these passages more easily than someone coming to the subject fresh.
Who Should Take This Walk
Listeners who want travel writing that does not flatten the places it visits. Anyone who has experienced grief that they have not yet found language for. Readers who came to love books like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s walking narratives or Pico Iyer’s Japan essays and want something that carries those traditions forward into the present. Those who should avoid it: listeners looking for a plot-driven narrative or a practical guide to the Kumano Kodo. This is not a trip planning resource. It is a work of literary art about what walking teaches you about loss.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need any prior knowledge of Japanese culture or the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage to follow the book?
No prior knowledge is required, though listeners with some familiarity with Japanese pilgrimage culture and Shinto and Buddhist geography will find the historical passages easier to track in audio format.
How much of the book is about grief and the lost friend versus the physical journey and Japan itself?
The two strands are woven together throughout. The grief is present from relatively early but builds in intensity toward the later sections. Neither strand dominates; they illuminate each other.
Is the downloadable PDF of photographs important, or is the audio complete on its own?
The audio is a complete experience. The photographs are integral to the project as Mod is a photographer and the images were made on the walk itself, so accessing the PDF adds meaningful depth but is not required.
How does Craig Mod’s self-narration compare to a professional narrator for a book of this nature?
It is an advantage rather than a limitation. His pacing matches the prose exactly, and his quiet, direct delivery suits the contemplative tone. Reviewers consistently describe feeling transported, which the narration contributes to significantly.
