This summer, I spent a good chunk of time in Osaka, Japan, under the pretense of a research trip, though it was mostly to shut myself up for fifteen seconds, which, more often than not, meant eating nearly everything in sight. I’d told my people back in Texas that I had flown out to finish a novel. Once I made it to Japan, I napped on friends’ couches and made faces at their toddlers, and those friends would ask why I wasn’t writing. But they didn’t ask too many times. So we’d steam at indoor baths, rolling immediately into evenings of beer, and, when the regulars at the neighborhood izakaya would ask what my book was about, assuming it would be some sort of technical manual or travel guide, I told them it was a love story.