Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

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⭐⭐⭐ Things Become Other Things — A Beautiful, Meditative Walk… That Eventually Lost Me

Author: Craig Mod
Genre: Nonfiction / Memoir / Travel Writing
Published: 2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ (3 out of 5)

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⚠️ TRIGGER WARNINGS

• Grief & murder (off-page, past event)

• Adoption & identity trauma

• Parental death

• Emotional detachment

• Loneliness

• Existential reflection

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🚨 SPOILER WARNING 🚨

This review contains FULL SPOILERS, including the ending. Proceed accordingly. 🛑

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📚 What This Book Is About (SEO-friendly overview)

Things Become Other Things is a walking memoir documenting Craig Mod’s month-long, solo trek across Japan’s Kii Peninsula in May 2021. Framed as a long, overdue letter to Bryan, Mod’s childhood best friend who was murdered at seventeen, the book blends travel writing, grief processing, and philosophical reflection as Mod walks 20–40 kilometers a day along ancient pilgrimage routes.

At its core, this is a book about movement as therapy, place as absolution, and whether walking long enough will finally untangle the knots we’ve been avoiding our entire lives.

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🥾 The Walk: Where the Book Is at Its Best

I’ll give credit where it’s due:
The beginning of this book genuinely works.

There’s something deeply cathartic about following Mod as he walks through:

• The Ise Kaidō

• The Ise-ji

• The Hongū-dō

• The Kumano Kodō (UNESCO World Heritage site)

The daily rhythm of walking, eating, sleeping, observing—repeat—creates a meditative flow that mirrors the mental space Mod is trying to access. His observations about:

• Depopulated villages

• Disappearing fishing and lumber towns

• Aging café regulars lingering in smoky kissaten

• Japan’s “healthy relationship with decay”

…are thoughtful, grounded, and often quietly beautiful.

This is slow literature, and at first, I was very much on board. 🧘‍♀️

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🧠 The Big Themes: Grief, Adoption, and Yoyū

Mod is walking while processing several lifelong wounds:

• The violent loss of Bryan

• His complicated relationship with his adoptive father

• His identity as an adoptee

• His blue-collar American upbringing contrasted with Japan’s concept of yoyū

Yoyū, as Mod defines it, is the emotional and social “excess” created by systems generous enough to keep people afloat—even in poverty. He finds this quality in the Kii Peninsula’s people, where kindness exists without urgency or expectation.

This concept is fascinating. Truly.
But here’s where the book started to wobble for me.

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😬 Where It Lost Me

About halfway through, I realized something uncomfortable:

👉 This is ultimately a reflection of Craig Mod’s inner life… and I didn’t feel invested enough to keep going at that depth.

The emotional core of the book is supposed to be Bryan—the friend whose death shattered Mod’s youth and lingered unresolved for decades. But Bryan remains frustratingly underdeveloped. We’re told he mattered. We’re told the loss was devastating.

But we don’t know him.

So when Mod continually circles back to his grief, I intellectually understand it—but emotionally, I couldn’t fully feel it. And without that anchor, the reflections began to feel… repetitive.

At a certain point, I found myself thinking:

I believe this mattered to you. I’m just not sure why it should matter this much to me.

And that’s a tough realization in a memoir.

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📖 The Mentor, the Lore, and the Long Look Back

One of the more engaging threads is Mod’s mentor, John McBride, whose daily historical notes—dubbed the “Book of John”—add cultural and mythological depth to the walk. These passages about emperors, poets like Bashō, Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, and everyday artifacts (coffee, hanko seals) were highlights for me.

They grounded the memoir in place, rather than self.

Ironically, I often wished the book leaned more into this external history and less into internal rumination.

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🧾 The Ending (Full Spoilers)

By the end of the journey, Mod completes his circuit of the Kii Peninsula and arrives at a place of quiet acceptance rather than dramatic catharsis.

There’s no emotional explosion.
No grand revelation.
No transformation montage. 🎬

Instead, the walk clarifies the shape of his grief rather than erasing it. Mod doesn’t “get over” Bryan’s death or his complicated feelings toward his adoptive father. He simply learns how to carry them—lighter, steadier, and with more generosity toward himself.

The book closes on a note of minor transcendence: small kindnesses from strangers, meals shared, conversations with an Irish priest named Seamus, and the sense that peace doesn’t arrive loudly—it just… shows up.

Which is very on-brand for this book.

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⭐ Final Thoughts

This is a beautifully written, deeply personal memoir that will absolutely resonate with:

• Readers who love slow, contemplative nonfiction

• Fans of walking literature

• Those drawn to Japan-focused travel writing

• Readers processing grief in quiet, internal ways

For me, though, it overstayed its welcome. I admired it more than I loved it.

✨ Thoughtful. Meditative. Occasionally profound. Eventually a little dull.
And that lands it at 3 out of 5 stars.

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📚 If You Liked This, Try These Instead

• The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane — walking, landscape, and meaning, with sharper narrative momentum

• Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson — travel writing with humor and emotional variety

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard — introspection with a stronger observational pull

• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson — if you want walking + personality + laughs

• On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz — reflective, but more outward-facing