I don’t know why I’ve held Japan to a different standard than I have the other great places of my life. Moving around as much as I do, I’ve noticed that it takes me at least eight months to get settled in a place enough to make friends and have a social network to the point that the place begins to feel like home. That’s how it worked in Africa, and that’s how it worked in Dunsmuir, California, the logging town in the northern mountains that I settled in after the Ivory Coast war, and where I wrote Whiteman. Really, in both places, I spent months and months completely isolated and almost desperate for companionship. Then right at month eight, everything came together. In...