Ridgeline subscribers —

Hello! It has been a month of movement over here. Both sides of a recent trip to the States (to speak at XOXO with Mr. Kottke) were disrupted by typhoons — my flight out was canceled and I had to do an (expensive) emergency rebook (my first airline couldn’t get me on a flight until a week later), and my flight home had to be moved (for free) up three days to “beat” the current typhoon back.

So now I write to you from my little perch in Tokyo, Bruce Brubaker’s rendition of Eno’s Music for Airports on the stereo, the world outside soaked, utterly soaked, the rain coming down in sheets. The typhoon took a little while longer than expected to hit, but hit it has.

Over on Roden (my other newsletter), I announced / “cover-revealed” the Random House edition of Thing Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir. Here’s the cover (that’s my photo):

It comes out May 6, 2025. You can pre-order now in all the usual places: Amazon, Bookshop.org, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble. Pre-orders send a big signal to distributors and bookshops to pay attention to a title. So every pre-order is a huge help, even this far out. I wrote about how RH-TBOT and SP-TBOT (the fine art edition I released last November) differ (they differ greatly).

I’ll be announcing a bunch of pre-order perks in November — save photos of your receipts / pre-order emails and you’ll be able to redeem them for all sorts of stuff soon.

Also, are you a Goodreads user? Please add Random House TBOT to your “shelf” if you’re into that sort of thing. Also, Random House posted about the book over on their Instagram account. Please give that sucker a like. Thank you!

Right now, I was supposed to be in the mountains of Yamagata, up on Dewasanzan — Dewa’s trio of mountains: Haguro, Yudono, and Gassan. I was supposed to be doing shugendō yamabushi mountain ascetic training. The plan was to speak at XOXO in Portland and then run to the airport, rush back to Japan, catch a flight up to Shonai airport in Yamagata, head to Haguro, don my white garb, and hunker down for a week of asceticism, sleep deprivation, and chanting. I would have been jet-lagged out of my mind. Mercifully, I was not accepted this year. I’d be lying to say that I didn’t feel a rush of relief when the rejection arrived in the middle of July. I knew how much an event like XOXO was going to drain my introvert battery, and I was right. Going in that state to be a Mountain Man: disaster.

My buddy John (who you will read about in the Random House edition of TBOT), however, is doing it, right now. Possibly soaked. Possibly miserable. Possibly in repose with a fellow ascetic standing over him, a Reiki healer, doing Reiki things with his Reiki hands. The 120-ish folks who assemble are eclectic, some quite famous. It’s John’s sixth time participating in a practice spanning back a thousand years. He’s doing it because his yamabushi mentor is completing his final course this year. So he’s up there, powering through a week of mild-hell in solidarity. (My plan was to go to support John in solidarity — solidarity turtles all the way down.) (Why did John start doing yamabushi training? He led a tour to Haguro, the head priest took a liking to the cut of his jib, and implored him to participate as a form of ethnographic / historical research.)

The full seven-day course that John’s amidst culminates in the aki-no-mineire festival on their last night, the final night of August, as we enter into fall. (Ahh, a thousand years ago, when September was actually cool, and some semblance of fall could be felt in the evening breeze here in these parts of Japan; alas, no longer true.) Though I haven’t done the big course, I have done a shorter four-day course. And have also completed a thirty-five kilometer yamabushi walk from Haguro back to Tsuroka proper. About the clothing I wrote:

The mountain focused hakama, or yamabakama. The star of the show. Gloriously size-free. Like putting on a giant pants sandwich. Step into the infinitude of leg-hole, and pull up the front sash above the navel. Wrap the attached obi around and tie at the back. Sloppy is OK since you then pull up the rear half of the pants, notch a little plastic tab into the just-tied sash (all this cloth is heavy), and then wrap two more fat obi bands around the body, tying in front, making a bow, securing it all, making you feel kinda bulletproof, like a lovingly tucked in adult-baby. The vast leg hole issue is solved by tugging on a rope sewn into the cuffs, evening it out, cinching tight, and tying the rope around the back of the calf, just below the knee. You now have ancient Hammer Pants, billowing, pure, can’t touch-able.

I can attest — even the shorter course was no joke. John’s full course is shrouded in secrecy — you’re not supposed to talk about what you do. (And to John’s credit, he has kept it secret.) But the shorter course supposedly does many of the same things, and I was told (by the guy running it) that I could write about it. So here is what can happen:

• very little sleep
• chanting in a room filled with the smoke of togarashi chili peppers, as your eyes and throat freak out in horror
• walks through the woods in the pitch-black of night, trying not to break your ankles, to local shrines, chanting, chanting, and more chanting
• climbing Mt. Gassan in your cotton clothing, drenched in sweat, to the freezing top, then freezing at the top
• descending, exhausted, along slippery, thin paths
• meals that last mere seconds, a small bowl of rice, a slurp of miso soup
• sweat, lots of sweat, technically no tooth brushing
• fording rivers in straw sandals to pray under the freezing glacial runoff of Mount Gassan, water falling so intensely that if you back up too far, it can knock you unconscious

John is doing an even more intense version of these things, over more days. That photo up at the top is the aki-no-mineire festival, shot back in 2016 (the first time John did this, I believe). I’ve been a few times to the festival (and missed it once because of a typhoon — the trains all stopped). You stay at a nearby shrine (a shukubō; randomly: where I wrote the closing/final goodbye to Hitotoki/Hi), eat a vegetarian meal, and wait for the exhausted and gaunt yamabushi to emerge, to come marching out to perform the ceremonies of the evening, and then the next day, to walk down the mountain in an impressive unbroken line.

So I’m going up tomorrow. The typhoon should be done by then. Four hours of trains to Tsuruoka and then a taxi to the base of the mountains. I’ll climb up the impressive stone staircase carved into the side of Mount Haguro with a few cameras in hand, and wait and see how John’s doing. Is he alive? One hopes. (Folks have, if not died, certainly been hospitalized over the years.) He will have been deprived of sleep, food, clean air, bathing, and relaxation for a week. On September first, many of the yamabushi migrate — immediately upon completion — to a local bath, a parade of pure stink and stubble, crack open beers, soak their weary bodies, exhausted yes, but also energized by the high of having completed the thing, the hard task, ready to carry back whatever they’ve learned into the “normal” day to day, a little stronger, a little leaner. Things becoming other things.

C