Things Become Other Things

Mod's walk through Japan's Kii Peninsula pilgrimage routes, undertaken during the pandemic border closures, gives him a container loose enough to hold childhood memory, adoption, a dead friend, and small-town rural Japan without any one thread crowding out the others. What critics have singled out isn't incident, this is a book of modest, cumulative encounters with fishermen, innkeepers, and cafe owners, but voice: an unforced, exact prose that lets the ordinary texture of walking do the emotional work rather than forcing epiphany. It's a quieter book than its premise suggests, more interested in accumulation than arrival, and it earns comparisons to classic Japanese travel writing without straining for them.