Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

Structure

Typhoon history in Kii

PS: bus

Title

Contents

Howdy

• Meditation on walking

• Saw a possible kissa

• Describes the indoors and engages with owner

• Reference to storm as metaphor for removal of establishments

• More observations on surroundings and talking with owner

P: stained belle

Walkers

• The walk plan
• Backstory: town he came from
• Experiences upon arrival at Japan
• Japan as a country of ancient walkers
• PS: baptist church
• Description of how quickly roads change
• Rewalking, remembering Bryan P: Tree on old building P: Old building, traffic cones

The Watch Shop

• Meeting a tour guide
• Ise Kaido quiet not bombed
• CM came America who bombed Japan, came from town that made plane engines to bomb Japan
• Grandfather
• History led CM and tour guide to meet in this walk
• Cafe: young couple turned watch shop to cafe
• meditation while walking: landscape can change easily - merging of landscape, walking, history, and stories (an intersection) PS: Neighborhood

Objects

• Backstory: Things he wanted as a child
• Made do with Nintendo and Zelda: a sense of “more”

Ippon-ura

• intro to ippon-ura: why ippon ura? What does ippon ura reveal?
• Walking slowl and deliberatelt shows patterns but not necessarily make you understand or know a place
• Found an ippon-ura that couldve been a good play to grow with Bryan
• Gratitude to memories
• Markers: choice of which path to follow

The Owner of the Inn

• The inn
• View from inside the room
• Drink with inn keeper: adoption, dead wife
• Backstory: adoption
• Spotlight: owner of the inn PS: Cemetery in the woods

Invitations

• reminders of death while walking Kii
• Death on his family on his 30th year
• Before funerals, an invitation to stay in Kii temples
• Kii changed him spiritually, helped him pass those funerals
• invitation to Kumano Kodo
• Thus began structuring his life around walks
• Walking helped him approach death
• Kii filled with reminders of decay and death
• P: Tsunami escape towers

Archetypes

• Step-father

• Archetypes

P: bench on bushes P: similar bench on bushes with barren trees

Problems

• stone markers

• Ancient pilgrimages

Things Become Other Things

• Trying not to break sobriety with his innkeeper
• Dinner and breakfast at the inn
• Adopted daughter of the innkeepers

PS: burning in the woods

Everyone

• old people he meets on the road

P: covered farm machinery

Ise

• Ise shrines being rebuilt every 20 years

• Backstory: how he met Bryan and how they developed their friendship

• his and Bryan’s secret paths blends with Ise

• Belief Ise religion || belief that Bryan and CM could build a life

P: abandoned van behind vegetation

Language

• landscape prompt: accents in the peninsula
• Backstory: how he learned Japanese
• Conversations tied to specific locations
• Backstory: “Fanny fucker”, Bryan’s father, language rules in CM’s house
• compensating bad language in youth with greeting locals in the walk

P: cabin in woods P: same cabin in woods but changed

Around Here

• greets an old lady

P: traffic object

Loggers

• encounter with loggers

P: hole in the ground surrounded by trees

Yukata

• Eating lobster reminds that Bryan won’t eat it
• Description of onsen experience: a man insisting him to wear the robe like a dead man
• Lobster wrapped like corpse → sleeps like a corpse to be buried tomorrow

Not my rope

• climbed mountain, beach, two men

P: beach

That Fighting Impulse

• Feels angry to the two men stealing ropes
• backstory: bullied for being adopted
• Walk as a way to move past that past (but sometimes the bad still happens and activates his old impulses)

Flame Tree

• Desolated parks
• A lone evergreen reminds him of playing arcade with Bryan (back and forth description of the memory and description of the landscape)

P: A lone evergreen in the park

Ants

• ”like ants of the Kumano pilgrimage”

PS: Torrii on the road

Ocean

• description of beautiful ocean

• described the town he walks on next from that covered the ocean with a wall

• A description of what could happen during a tsunami

• description of a different town without a wall, unafraid for what’s to come

Shitholes and Not Shitholes

• Stay with a good place
• Talks about the problem of lack of children and Japan’s old population

P: Bike in shadows

I Speak With a Farmer

• a lyric essay: farmer, lost sickle, office women in rural Japan

PS: Baseball field

Meth

• Backstory: Profiled by a cop on his way to bury his adoptive father.

Owase

• Owase
• Difficulty of buying drugs in Japan so people resort to alcohol
• Backstory: drugs at his hometown, suffering based on culture, studying to protect them, state of girls
• Commentary on social system in Japan saving the poor
• Fishing

Hanko

• Description of a hanko stamp shop and hanko production

P: Tree beside old buildings P: Shredded wooden window covers

Scale

• account of a kissa called Scale ran by an old ironworks guy

• pizza toast, then used it as a segue to talk about what he ate as a child, including memories of his adoptive father and Bryan

• Returns to Scale and describes what’s happening during a rain

• Owner shows him his frogwork

Dispatch: Animals

• A lyric essay of chance encounters with different animals in his walk. He mentions places where he encounted them and they’re from different parts far from each other

Meat

• short trivia

Octopus

• short vignette

Hamlets

• account of a beautiful path to Maruyama Senmaida

P: Bridge foundations overlooking mountains

Guns

• boar hunting
• local story about the bruise on a lowe side of a statue

P: Path on an upland woods

Tough

• description of a mountan route with inns that are now gone

P: Mound of stones

Fishing Poles

• encounter with a woman who mistook his walking poles for fishing poles
• Story of the woman’s brother who was sick and she needed to visit her by walking mountains
• Cm reflects on mountains to walk to
• Brother became a fisherman (poetry, tying end with beginning)

P: Tent shack under a tree

Flatten the Mountain

• a historical telling of what could’ve happened on this landscape in the past
• Shares a local lore then contrasts that what’s happening now

P: two gree hairy poles kissing

Geisha

• Account of meeting a fellow walker on the road and interviewing her about the place
• Description of the women in Nigishima
• Backstory to the woman who helped her grandma

P: white wall with aircon outside and wires

• more sharing about the town and its history of geisha
• Account of his walk alone in the woods, describing it as he experiences and sees the place (good point to learn close description).

Vending Machines

• story of his alcoholism and its source
• A vending machine at the middle of a rice paddy

PS: forest path made of roots

That Foating Feeling

• describes how sometimes he runs to beat the sun
• Backstory: Bryan and him running, Bryan’s father
• Return to the present run
• hearing the Nanki Express from the distance, compares walking with riding the train
• Remembers Bryan again

Kii-Katsura

• evening walk around town
• early morning observation from his room

PS: junction of a town

Copper

• lyric essay containing folk stories of the place

PS: house

Just One Quick Walk

• Backstory: His regret not walking with his grandpa when he was younger

The Boat

• Describes how without human touch the peninsula covers paths with foliage.
• Describes a boat subsumed
• returns to above hypothesis: eventually everything will be covered by grass

Parkinson’s

• (this is a beautifully written vignette, one I could learn a lot from)
• Describes an elated walk
• Then tells he is sitting on a kissa waiting for his order without directly saying it.
• Notices Parkinson’s from kissa owner.
• backstory: Remembers his grandmother’s struggles with Parkinson’s
• describes in detail the kissa owner’s parkinson’s
• Tells the kissa owner’s backstory based from their talk
• Concludes with connecting the shore with the peninsula and body and Shishiiwa rock.

Koya Fire

• Backstory: Bryan and him saved lighters
• Describes the fire rituals he witnessed during new year’s eve
• Dangers of the fire rituals, connects it with Bryan
• Concludes with a description of the landscape.

PS: large barren tree in the middle of roofs pov from train

Immutable stuff

• peninsula imagined as a god bringing forth what it desires

• Relates to the old town as preordained. Meeting Bryan as immutable.

Gyuba Doji

• story of thieveries on Gyuba Doji: lost head and moss
• says that he and Bryan would hve done the same on the head
• Says he touches the scar on the statue’s neck and feel the hearts of those who did it

Shallow Roots

• Describes Ishikura Pass and its history of monocultural lumber planting
• Describes his first pass to it risky among fallen logs
• Backstory: how he and Bryan took risk
• Present: walks Ishikura Pass and it is cleared. Synthesis: welcoming danger when one is used to it.

P: First walk on Ishikura Pass P: Second walk

Farmer and His Cat

• just a feel good encounter with a farmer and his cat

P: little white truck on a dirt path

Nachi Falls

• Describes Nachi falls and first time watching a waterfall
• Describes the cafe with a clear view of the falls

P: Nachi falls behind trees

P: Nachi falls from the distance

Voodoo*

• historical account: someone who trained near the waterfalls and got power
• Backstory: Cm and Bryan’s training, sutras, and power

P: Large vines growing under iron fences on a rock wall

Shotgun Shacks

• Description of the local
• description of a house by a farmer and his house
• an imaginative conclusion

P: Shack

Okonomiyaki

• Account of requesting a recipe from a lady in an okonomiyaki shop and the chat that followed

Dispatch: The Hotel

• Very short description of the weird hotel he stayed at.

PS: Laundry place

Kissa Ron

• description of a breakfast at Kissa Ron
• ambiance, music, food
• Description of Kissas in general
• Description of a classic wooden telephone booth

Spirals *

• Craig shares Bryan’s phone number

The Blue Home

• A walk that led him to a blue home that reminded him of Bryan’s house

• Craig lays down all the cards about Bryan

PS: The Blue Home

Seamus

• Meeting the priest

Stone

• CM directly talks to Bryan telling him this peninsula is where they could’ve been together.

Zelda

• saw a sign of a shrine

• goes to the shrine and contrasts it to the plain he came from

• Remembers playing Zelda with Bryan

• Describes the shrine more

• Makes a connection between Bryan and the shrine

• Concludes with a description of thr soundscape and lightscape.

Luck

• near death experience while walking

• Explains why the peninsula can be difficult

• Tells about a buddhist sculptor he met

• Talks to Bryan telling him about archetypes

Lighter

• tells about finding a collection of his childhood photos

• Tells that bryan is within these photos just unseen

P: CM’s photos

Dispatch: Children

• lyric essay of vignettes about his encounter with children
• Includes meditation on these children’s walks

Curse the Road

• account of the debacles of the last day of the walk, how it lead him to cursing
• Hydtrated by energy drink, he played along with kids
• Finds a man smoking
• Cursing changed to kindness
• Remembers Bryan, shares how they parted ways

Asso

• listening to foul-mouthed ladies

Body Ask

• Continued walking instead of riding the train

Vocabs

Rascal Wheel Caw Clamber Kudzu Capricious Palpable Perm Dollop Shimmy Patina Diaphanous Palinode Contrition Opulent Lambency Palaver Alacrity Cortege - funeral procession Seared Umamasity Coo Stoop Gab Gibber Hoot Teeter Gorge Gangly Scuttle Scurry Skittish Dolt Bevy Serow Slather Trawl Suffuse Meretricious Gangbusters Inlaid Interloper Stoop Arboreal Glissade Burly Festoon Clack Searing Veracity Denude Grate Fecundity Subsume Croon Pilaf Nudnik Bushwhack Voluble Huckster Stochastic - random Downage Waggle Supple Scuff Scrawny Fizz Febrile Prognostication Bupkis - nothing at all Flanked - to be situated on the side of Apotheosis Somber Blight Shingle Plopped Teetotaler Anomie Strewn Waterboarding Beckon Anagogical Billow Flitting Sleety Ledge Lithe Slick Nook Tug Frazzle Petulance Doofus Taffy Pleat

Idioms

Stars raining down on the rice fields Making limp the uncut grass The peninsula begins to eat itself in spring

Insights

• Is there a historical thread that perhaps binds me with Los Baños? Executed correctly, it could tie perfectly with my being here.
• The writing should combine: the act of walking past space, meaning-making of each point of space, reflection on decay and change, tying together current stories with history
• The walk just simply resists narrativity. You have no choice but to jump from one memory to another.
• These blocks of text are like scenes in a movie. This is why watching a movie can only improve your writing.
• Again: what is in the landscape? How does it connect with your inner life? How does it connect with the bigger story of people there?
• Try to use poetry by combining images together or putting them alongside each other or in one section
• A formula: describe what you see in the walk, go specific to one person or place, find a story there, then wrap it up with a witty, poetic conclusion that could tie everything together
• Photo: very minimalist colors, low exposure
• The drinking scene affected me (see diary entry for 2023-12-17). CM skips time, goes to the past by returning to the present via the gravity of the walking act. While he walks, objects in the landscape triggers his knowledge about the history of the place, his personal history, meditations on walking, and stories of people he meets in the walk.

References

Mod, C. (2023). Things Become Other Things: How to Walk Japan Book Two: Ise-Kaidō, Ise-ji, Nakahechi, Kohechi, Ōmine Okugake-michi, Ōhechi Monkeys, Fried Bologna, M1911 Pistols, Cocaine, Lobster Brains, Leeches, and Foul-mouthed Schoolgirls (1st ed.). Special Projects.