"Purpose is being denuded from every aspect of society"

It was an honor to talk to Craig Mod, the author of this month’s book Things Become Other Things to hear more about his work and outlook.

Not only did we discuss some of the themes that the book touches on—including comparisons between Japan and America, friendship, mentorship, families—but we got into some wider-ranging stuff too, including being vulnerable, capturing people’s voices, and how people are losing (and in many cases already have lost) a sense of why they’re doing it all. 

Here’s an edited version of our chat. I hope you enjoy it!

Bobbie: You go on a lot of walks, and you write about them in various ways. Which ones become something bigger? What was it about this one that told you it needed to be a book, and when did you make that decision?

Craig: My thinking is that I'm going to use every walk for a book. There's a whole bunch of other books that I'm just waiting for the time to work on, and they are all seated by the walks. For this one, I'd been walking the Kii Peninsula for a while, and this walk in particular, I was trying to tie together a bunch of loose strands—bits I'd walked already—all at once. My other book is on the Nakasendō, and so I'd done a Tōkaidō walk in between. But I didn't want to do a Tōkaidō book right away—that felt too close to the last book. And it was during Covid, so there are all these very surreal elements to the Kii Peninsula walk that I just felt a little more, spiritually. Sociologically, historically, and because of the Covid stuff, momentous and important. I started publishing this newsletter that was called 21 Days Of Writing a Book. And I started that in September 2021 with the thought that I was just gonna take the newsletter and edit it into a book and then be done in 21 days. So the hope was for it to be very quick, but it wasn't. It wasn't quick at all.

How long was it, then? How many more “21 days” did it take?

Probably five times more, at least 100–150 days of serious work that had to come after that. That was in 2021, and then I had sort of a draft in the beginning of 2022, and then all the Bryan stuff. Bryan was mentioned in it, but he didn't get pulled out in the way that he is now until later in 2022. Then it was spring of 2023 when I went and shopped the book around in New York. I didn't have any responses from anyone, and I said, All right, I'm gonna do this myself. Then, in the middle of prepping the fine art edition, Random House got back to me, and they're like, “we absolutely want this.” And I said, Well, I'm doing my fine art edition, so you can have the trade hardcover and paperback rates if you want. 

You can have the leftovers!

The thinking was I can't trust these people. I can't trust the industry out there. I've engaged with it enough, I've had enough meetings where people are “we're absolutely doing a book together! Oh, definitely!” and things have not materialized. There's something really just frustrating about it. My background as well, having autonomy and having control of my destiny through something like my program [more later] is actually psychologically really important for me, maybe more than the average person. It wasn't about leftovers at all. It was just like, Look, you guys left me in the lurch for three, four months. I know how to do this. I have a system set up. I have great people I can work with. It's not going to be a compromised product. I think we can do something different. I don't think these are even going to be competing. They share the same name, and even that, I wonder if we should have changed the name when doing the Random House edition, because it's twice the length of the fine art edition, and it's completely reconfigured in terms of structure. So it really does feel like a true evolution of the book. They were quite flexible and amicable about me keeping my fine art edition. 

So, if someone asked me for a precis of what the book is about, I would say: here's this guy Craig, he's an American who moved to Japan as a young man, and he goes on a 300 mile walk on a pilgrimage around a remote Japanese Peninsula, meets lots of interesting characters on the way that show him about the past, present and future of Japan and America. And that leads to musings on his own life on everything that's going on in the world, and kind of pulls it all together in this sort of meditative pilgrimage of its own sort. Tell me where that's right and wrong. What would you change?

It is a hard book to summarize, or to give an elevator pitch—and we're running into that problem with selling the Japanese rights, because Japanese publishers aren't getting it—but yeah, it's a book about a guy walking around this remote peninsula during Covid, thinking about the peninsula and its history, and wondering why America breaks when Japan doesn't. That's sort of, to me, the big crux of it. It is kind of a sneakily quite political book, criticizing America because the Japan that I'm walking around on that Peninsula is, you know, pretty identical to where I grew up, socio-economically, in terms of being post-industrial, and yet it doesn't have any of the problems that the towns like mine in America have. 

And so Bryan [a childhood friend who Mod is addressing at points in the book] is someone that was really important to me as a kid, obviously, but he also serves a few purposes for the book. One is like, I can explain things to him, and it doesn't feel like I'm talking down to the reader, I hope. It doesn't feel like I'm trying to be “Japan guy” and explain Japan to you. I don't want to be that. I don't want to “demystify the Orient.” There's a lot of travel writing from the 70s, 80s and 90s, that really hits you over the head with this kind of like, “let me demystify these inscrutable people for you.” And I hate that tone. 

So with Bryan, I can be like, Hey, man, this is crazy, but the emperor pooped in a kitty litter box. Isn't that weird? in a way that hopefully does not feel like, “Let me explain to you why Japanese people don't, you know, laugh as much as we do.” I hate that, and I'm not trying to be a demystifier.

And Bryan is important to the book, but he's not the central character. You're not writing everything to Bryan all the time in the way that an epistolary book would be. You're in and out of conversation with him, and he's part of your memories as you reminisce. 

He sneaks in more and more as the book progresses, but I'm not talking to him in real life: I'm talking to him in a book because he gets murdered. 

We are side by side in elementary school, essentially identical. But why does he end up on the path where he gets murdered, and I'm able to somehow get out? There's all these small systemic things that start to cleave you apart earlier and earlier, that lead to greater changes further down the timeline. So that's also a criticism of the US system that if you don't somehow slot into a slightly higher testing bracket, then you're going to get murdered. This is just so demented! So the book really is about how dysfunctional, how broken American systems are today, but trying to do that without saying “this is a book about taking down contemporary America” which is kind of a boring book to write.

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Another character I wanted to ask about is John, or as you call him “The Book of John.” He also looms large. Can you tell us a bit more about him?

John is the person who got me walking, just a sort of mentor figure. In Japanese, you'd say senpai kōhai (senior/junior). We met a little under 20 years ago, connected through the art world. John's a very smart guy, and he's very capable, and he's had a lot of responsibility, a lot of pretty incredible jobs throughout his life. He lived in Japan from basically age 17 to 44-ish, with a couple breaks in there. He was running Sky TV, and working side-by-side with Rupert Murdoch. They were BFFs, and which is just funny, this is pre-big scandal Rupert, pre-Fox News. John was running Sky TV, and then he sort of retired at 44, got involved with the art world, and he worked with a lot of Aboriginal artists. He was doing these big walks in the deserts and getting involved with Aboriginal communities. He’s involved in a bunch of stuff, like a Forrest Gumpian kind of figure. We got connected through art, and then he started inviting me on some walks in 2012, 2013, and it was through watching him interact with people that I learned some manners. Essentially, I grew up without any manners, and his Japanese is just this really high register Imperial, super-respectful Japanese. And I was like, OK, that's how you can use that and not sound like a dimwit. And it was in watching him that I was like, OK, maybe I can do this on my own, and then thinking, actually, there's something ethnographically and sociologically interesting about interacting with these people in the countryside. 

I had built up these language skills and cultural understanding, but I wasn't really using it in any way. I'd never really worked in Japan or worked with Japan, and I was also at this point of trying to figure out what my relationship with the country should be going forward. Then I was like, Oh, this is, this is quite useful. This uses all my skills. I can do these walks. My body really loves it. The physicality is great. I'm able to kind of interact with people, and generate a vulnerability pretty quickly. And I just thought this is really fun and started writing about it. The walks kind of grew more and more, and John was just a big cheerleader of me growing the walks and growing the work. During Covid he couldn't be here, so he would kind of follow me on GPS, and then every day send me like a little packet of historical facts and stuff.

He seems like an endless font of information. Is the book of John in John’s head, or is he just cribbing Wikipedia for you?

It is, freakishly, mostly in his head. He just has a head that can do that, and he does talks all the time and presentations, and has drafted a bunch of books, and so he has researched a lot of the places that I’m walking through over and over and over again.

One thing I enjoyed about Things Become Other Things was that you brought a kind of crudeness—maybe that’s the wrong word—but there’s no need for any airs or graces. You’re often commenting on scatalogical stuff, like the Emperor pooping, or everyone’s standing around naked in the spa with their dicks out and you tell it like it is. And you capture folk’s voices as well: Many books I've read about Japan, everyone speaks in this very formal tone, or their speech is reported back in a very formal way. You seem to work pretty hard at capturing a dialect or a tone that's much more kind of rough, that makes it much easier for the reader to see who these people are. It's very human, it's very visceral. And how hard did you have to work at that? Is that all a deliberate, conscious effort?

It's just very natural. I mean, it just feels like how it should be. There wasn't a lot of hemming and hawing about, oh god, how should these people speak, or what's the voice of it? This is just how these people speak, and especially in the peninsula—I don't know if you'd say crude, but they're just very salt-of-the-earth. A lot of people write about Japan as if Japanese people don't fart, you know? And, yeah, these, these people are farting like crazy, you know, just like all over the place, and they don't care. And they're really wonderful. 

There's an element of Japan that can be really stifling, which is that over-formality of things: you've been friends with someone for 10 years and you've never seen their apartment. That's very common. But when you get into the countryside, it's really freeing to feel this other kind of voice that's present. This other kind of openness. And the people down in the peninsula really are like that. 

I started doing all the walks around the exact same time I started spending a lot of time in North Carolina. I love the way that people speak in North Carolina. There's this kind of intelligent folksiness I found there that was, to me, extremely poetic. This is obviously what Faulkner and people are kind of drawing on: that the most interesting American English is by far and away down in the South, absolutely. It's just the way they speak, how they speak, the rhythms and all that. So that was sort of on my mind when I started meeting all these people. And it just seemed like, oh, yeah, this is a natural transposition to give them. They're speaking in the same register.

It definitely feels different to lots of the books I read about Japan; the voices I hear.

Because the books take place in Tokyo, right? The Tokyo register is quite boring. It's really not fun at all. And I think of the Japanese contemporary authors that kind of get at this, these other registers: Mieko Kawakami is very raw. She's amazing. She's hilarious. We met, did an event together a year ago, and became spontaneous good friends. She's just a bundle of rough and tumble Japanese: we text and it's just insane. I'm learning about Japanese every time we send texts to each other, because I'm like You could do that? That's a construction? I know her translator, Sam Bett, and a couple of other translators, I think they've done a pretty good job at getting out of that stifled, overly rigid Japanese.

There's another author I want to mention, Tōson Shimazaki. He wrote this book Before The Dawn, which takes place on the Kii Peninsula. I just found out about this book about two months ago! He grew up in Shingu as a buraku, which is basically an untouchable class in Japan. He became famous and died very young, but he was sort of like this sort of super-bright, shining literary star in his 20s and 30s. And he kind of gave voice to the buraku in literature for the first time, really, in Japanese contemporary literature. This book was written in the 50s or 60s, and I think it was translated quite a while ago. One of “if I had an infinite time”  projects would be to go back to his work and then re-translate it, with more of an eye to a contemporary, less-stifled version of Japanese. But even in that kind of older version of translation, you feel this kind of rawness. Really, these people are even more similar to where Bryan and I grew up than anything else I've ever read in Japanese literature. 

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I thought this was a very male, masculine book. It made me think about what would happen if a woman did the same walk as you. What would she come across? How would she see it? What conversations would she have? You’re an outsider in some ways, but you are an insider in others, because you're there with an innkeeper or in a kissa, with the owner knocking back drinks, along for the ride… but it seems like they take you in as a kind of a temporary son. But do you think that would be the same for a woman?

You mean a non-Japanese woman? Yeah, yes, and maybe even even more—maybe it would be even more disarming for a woman to kind of be going into these places. If it was a female version of me, someone who's lived here for a long time, who speaks the language, so there's no communication issues, and is interested in getting to kind of more vulnerable places... I think the thing with me is I've built up these skills through… I mean, therapy is very helpful. The more you talk through all of the crazy stuff you've lived through or experienced or felt in your life, the easier it is to discuss it as if it was anything else. So I'm able to go and meet someone, and if they ask “where are you from” or “what's your town like?” I'll just be like: look it was rough; my best friend was murdered. This stuff reconfigures what is acceptable to talk about quickly and in a way that hopefully doesn't feel forced. It's not like making this big confession. 

So I think, absolutely, if you a woman was doing this, especially alone, I think I would almost engender even more sympathy and more help because people would be a little more worried about her than me. I don't think anyone was worried about me, but I could imagine people… giving her even more bread to tie on to her pack, or “come stay at my house” like the kissa owners, the women at the kissas. 

For me, the reason why it's so male oriented is that I connect with men more readily than the female characters, just in terms of opening up. I feel like I'm an old man whisperer. I empathize with them because I think a lot of old men carry with them this sense of a certain amount of shame and regret—especially in Japan, but even in America. In North Carolina, I ended up befriending this 80-year-old lawyer and he became extremely confessional with me over the course of our friendship. I think the same thing here in Japan: it's like I'm able to see these guys in a way that most people can't or don't want to do. And so that ends up creating these stronger connections that can happen almost instantly. And I don't find I have that with the women so much. 

It does remind me that older men carry things around: everyone's grandfather was quiet, or kept himself to himself. You just have to dig under the surface and you see what's there: the regret, or the shame, or the duty, or whatever it is they're carrying with them. You seem to have a knack for getting there.

I'm just trying to model that vulnerability isn't scary. Obviously, you can go too far, it could just be like everything is like trauma porn. There's a line you can walk where you can model a little bit of that kind of openness that maybe they've never even seen before in their lives, especially in Japan. 

But I think also in other cultures, male bottled-upness, like you're talking about her grandparents or whatever, is definitely a real thing. So for me, the next big white whale of getting an older guy to be vulnerable is that I think I'm gonna go try to meet my birth father later this year. I've never met him, I just found out he is alive like a year ago. And he is, by all accounts, hated by everybody. So like, I'm kind of like, Oh, perfect. If anyone in the world could absolve this poor, sad fucker, it’s me. Probably I can go and maybe see him for who he is, you know, maybe a bit beyond all of his sins, almost like a priest. I mean, there's something priestly about these walks and meeting these people.

So that's another book. And a big topic to tackle. But back to this book, if you say a lot of it is comparing post-industrial Japan with post-industrial America, then what’s the answer to the difference. Why does Japan stand when America falls?

Fundamentally it’s this kind of egalitarian distribution of opportunity, right? That's all we're talking about, really. You can frame it as distribution of wealth, but I really think it's just opportunity: just giving people a sense of purpose solves a lot of problems. I think if Bryan and I had grown up in our town in 1955 we both probably would have been carpenters or something. It really is just that there's a certain tier of job in America now that doesn't exist, which is why you end up with all these problems that you do today around this political upheaval and chaos. The sense of it all, to me, boils down to purposelessness. 

I think in Japan, there still is this ability to pull purpose out of certain kinds of work. But this is changing in Japan now: this is what we're feeling in the last five years, is the shift with immigrants coming in to do the menial labor jobs. Even just 10 years ago or 15 years ago, even the convenience store worker was elevated and operated at this kind of unthinkable level of pride and commitment. I think there was something about that—as long as you can maintain a little bit of that sense of pride and respect for every tier of job, every kind of work, it makes it a lot less seductive to kind of reach for drugs or to do violent stuff. 

Also, yakuza. This is another problem now, is that the yakuza are disappearing. They're getting eradicated because of police reform and whatnot, and the result is you're starting to see way more petty crime in Japan than you've ever seen before, you're starting to see kids kind of doing these dumber things, getting a little more violent. What would happen previously is if you were a kid who somehow didn't have any opportunity, didn't have the right skill set, maybe had mental health issues, the Yakuza were always there for you to join, and then they were almost like a halfway house for a lot of these kids, and they would keep you in line with a very rigid set of guidelines and rules and all this stuff. And so it kind of maintained a really peaceful element of society. So the second order effects of losing yakuza are now people's like, hot water heaters are getting stolen, you know? All these other “yami baito”, like dark jobs, dark part-time jobs. You're starting to see more and more of those, because those kids don't know where to go. So Japan is changing. 

In some ways, this is maybe a eulogy for that old Japan where things were egalitarian, but also a way of saying: look, it is possible. It did, and it does exist to a certain degree—probably in America in the 50s and 60s for certain demographics—and certainly existed in Japan, this ability to distribute opportunity, this sense of purpose. But we're losing it, and it’s worthwhile to take a moment to think about why we're losing it, and if it's possible to ever get it back.

So is there something that we can get back to in that, or do we have to envisage new ways of what it looks like?

I think this all ties into the AI discussion—not to derail us too far from walking in Japan—but there is this sense that on a greater scale, purpose is being denuded from every aspect of society. From illustration or animation work to writing itself, to editing. Translation has basically been eviscerated. I don't know anyone who would hire someone to translate non-mission critical documents or non-top-tier literary fiction or nonfiction. Who would not just use one of the many, many tools we have now that are quite incredible at doing 90% good-enough translations? Most of my literary translator friends are using machine translation as a first pass. 

You've seen the movie “Interstellar”? They're on the planet with intense gravity, and in the distance they think it's a beautiful mountain range—and then they realize it's a giant wave coming to kill them. I feel like there's an element of that in terms of purpose destruction. Will we lose purpose? This is all early days, so who knows, but computer programming, writing code… the number of eulogies you see almost daily on something like Hacker News, with people writing these really emotional eulogies to programming, saying “it's done. We're not programmers any more.” 

I think that's interesting, and I see it as a parallel of taking away all the blue collar jobs that existed in America, in my town with the airplane engine factory and the Colt gun factory and all that. To me, it’s a material version of this kind of white collar purpose-scrubbing that feels like it's happening, or will be happening. So I think we're gonna have to contend, on a much broader scale societally, with where and how we drive purpose. 

I actually think this is a great conversation to have, because I think we've falsely ascribed purpose in the past… working in a coal mine, you know, that's actually something no one should be doing. It's easy to be hagiographic and go, Well, that was so romantic to be able to go into the coal mine and then come up all dusty and be able to feed my family. No, no one should be going in the coal mine. No, I should be doing that.

And they eulogize it at age 48 because by 52 they've died of lung cancer.

Exactly, it's insane. Obviously, programming doesn't, doesn't give you immediate brain cancer, but some programming is really incredible, right? It's fascinating. You got guys like John Carmack, who are just coming up with all these algorithms and doing all these incredible feats of thinking around how to manipulate code and computers. But most programming is not that! Most programming is trying to get an ad product to be more sticky. 

The book Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico was Booker long-listed last year, and is worth reading as an evisceration of what contemporary white collar front end web work is like. It was really hard to read because you just see yourself in it, if you've engaged in this world at all. It's basically following two expats who move to Berlin in 2005 and it follows them to 2020. My reading on the book is that you're doing all this work, and you try to ascribe meaning and purpose to it, and then in the end, you realize maybe there wasn't that much meaning or that much purpose to a certain kind of client work. 

So anyway, I feel like you know what's happened with blue collar stuff is coming for white collar work, and I think it will require a societal-wide reckoning of how we generate a sense of purpose. But I think on the other side of this, I think this is a very terrible, hellish thing. We're entering this trough of absolute pain. But on the other side of it I do believe there is actually a much better place where, if we can get over that other edge and be able to look back, we’ll go Wow, that's so weird that we thought, you know, programming ad software, was a really important thing that we should be doing when now… I don't know what the other side is, maybe everyone's just meditating. It's like a Kool Aid cult. Who knows.

After all, we used to have economies that ran entirely on slave labor and nobody really knew what it would look like if we changed it. 

I don't know if there's some platonic, Brigadoon, end spot of like, perfection. But I feel like we never know entirely what we're doing, and we're probably doing a lot of things the wrong way. Even today, working conditions in China are probably not far off from indentured servitude. Did you read the book Apple in China? It's pretty it's pretty damning. The turnover in those Apple factories was something like 60 or 70% year over year? What kind of job encourages 70% of the people to quit within six months? That can't be a good job. There's so much of what we buy and consume today that is run on the backs of an economy like that. We're not doing things right today either. 

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This is going to be a hard segue, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your membership program, Special Projects, and how you operate as an author, because it's unusual. Independence for you is not just a place you've had to suddenly arrive at: you've been building all of these skills and a repertoire of what it takes to be an independent creator for a long time. 

So, Special Projects is my membership program. You can pay $100 a year, and you get essentially nothing. That was the original pitch: You just like what I'm doing, and you want me to keep doing it, and that should be the overwhelming reason why you join. I'm not promising “Oh, you're gonna get this special thing for me.” 

I'm on year eight of the program now: It launched seven years ago. I do these board meetings every six months with a Q&A session, and you build up, turns out a huge corpus of video crap: I've done a bunch of live streams talking about backpacks, talking about prepping for walks,  I've done live streams of working—laying out books, where you can see my InDesign, and I'm narrating what I'm doing. We have like 120 hours of members-only video up in the archive now.

Then I take all my pop-up walks: I'll do a walk for a month or whatever, and I'll run a newsletter for that time, and I don't archive it publicly, but I put the archive in the Members section, and now there's 10 pop-up walk archives with like, 100,000 words of writing in there. 

And then last year, on a lark—because I wanted to learn more about these coding tools—I used Claude Code and built, to me, the platonic ideal of Twitter, just for members. Now a lot of people are signing up just to be able to use my social network, which is interesting.

I want to reiterate that, like, or iterate that, like, I'm not doing anything for members. I'm doing all this stuff for me first and foremost, and for the book-writing. I do the board meetings, not because I feel like I have a duty to members to do this thing, but because if I do these reflections, it makes me work better for the next six months. If I livestream an InDesign session, it makes me do the InDesign session and be more efficient than I would otherwise. I don't ever want to feel like I'm managing a community, because then that's the job. Everything is about getting the next book done, and everything is, I hope, in service to that and just makes me more efficient at that work. And then, you know, if the members get a benefit out of the things that that kind of detritus… if there's value in that great, but I'm not, I'm not ever strategizing or thinking about that stuff.

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Thanks, Craig. Next up will be our announcement for March’s book of the month in just a week: I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all.