Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

A pilgrimage was the easiest way to get permission to travel. Who could deny the need for spiritual aid? And why travel? Because it was fun. Sure, you were going to the gods and kami to ask for help, but also the road was a carnival, travelers and food and cheeky carousing aplenty. Very little tight-lipped stoicism.

In April, fathers enter the bath and dunk their two-year-old sons, carrying them then on their shoulders up over the pass, over to where I sit, these holy grounds, and then up to Hongū Grand itself. The “Book of John” tells me that once dipped, those sons are “imbued with the gods of Kumano.” Can’t let their feet touch the ground until they pass th

A friend, now ninety years old, who has run a gorgeous ryokan on the coast of Kyushu for some sixty years, once told me, hotels are just prepubescent ryokans. “Inns without hair” is the exact quote. And staying here, you feel it wholly—how refined and mature it is compared to your average hotel. The Marriott ain’t got nothing on this place. A baby

Kii is as good a place as any to meditate on the past. Folks here cultivate a healthy relationship with decay. The right storm could wipe it all clean overnight. And that’s fine, they seem to say, and sometimes outright say it.

The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness—forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball—a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skul

think often of the closing scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru—the story of a dying government employee, working to get a small park made in central Tokyo before he expired.

In this way, they are ideal walkers, and have found the true walk. Their walk is a walk of peace, of a collective social decision to allow it to happen. Eyes are on them. Eyes peering out from behind hedges and eyes beside pushed-back curtains. Eyes attached to adults who care, who have the yoyū to care, who watch at a distance. Their freeness of w

I’ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn’t enough.

what the “Book of John” teaches in its outré ways. Its processes seem so simple, and yet are so effective, that they tremble in—as Peter Matthiessen aptly describes Machapuchare in The Snow Leopard—mysterium tremendum. The “Book of John” contains facts, but it is easy to be fooled. It is not about the facts. It’s about pointing your compass toward