THINGS BECOME OTHER THINGS

A meditative travelogue through a part of Japan few outsiders ever see.

“We carry our lives on our backs and traverse the spine of the world, no humans for miles, no routes down, just forward or back, the beast below always shifting, always ready to heave us off.” So writes Mod, a resident of Japan, in this narrative of meandering on long solo walks through the quiet woods of the country’s Kii Peninsula. Bordered by some of Japan’s largest cities, the lightly populated region is “one of the rainiest places in the earth’s subtropical region,” wetter than even the Amazon, as attested to by Mod’s lovely if somber black-and-white photographs, studies in mist and fog. The people Mod encounters in the rugged mountains in the time of Covid-19 are resigned to the injustice of the world and the rough wisdom of nature. Says one woman of the virus and its effects, “the world all goin’ sideways…and don’t know if it can right itself.” Others, men mostly, are quick to offer booze, seemingly looking for an excuse to get blotto, an invitation to which Mod, a nondrinker, politely declines in fluent Japanese. Everyone, though, is kindly disposed if sometimes gruff, living examples of the Japanese concept of “yoyū,” “a word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance.” Much of Mod’s battery of facts comes from what he calls the “John Effect,” honoring a friend who is deeply learned in the history and culture of every corner of Japan, including “these recondite hinterlands.” He addresses his narrative to another friend from long ago, living somewhere in an America that Mod barely recognizes (“How can you say that a country ‘loves’ you without providing health care?”), but his account reaches far beyond private reminiscence to become an exemplary travel narrative, instructive and entertaining.

Elegant and inspired: just the thing to read along with Basho and other pilgrims into Japan’s back country.