From the titular passage of Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things, a memoir partially about walking through the ancient pilgrimage trails of Japan’s depopulating Kii peninsula:
As the husband drives me down off the mountain, back to the Ise-ji path, he breaks our silence by saying, She aint… our daughter.
I am entranced by something out the window: Beyond the fields, past a dirt road, in the forest something burns.
Before I can register what he said, he continues with more fuency: She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a job, somehow… found us. Not a daughter but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become… other things.
I’ve been reading Mod’s writing (newsletters, etc) for quite a while (I just checked: 2015!). Other than being people who write largely via the internet (him: more and better), we have essentially nothing in common. Yet through the bizarre, inevitable parasocial relationships you develop with people who share of themselves, I can’t help but feel like I know the guy. Which, to be clear, I don’t. But it’s a good memoir. Japan is a crazily popular tourist destination right now, but there’s no way I or most people could hope to travel Japan like Mod has captured here.