Free Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding

twelve-year-old bottle from Kyoto. Aged sake makes up only a fraction of a percent of Japan’s total sake production, and remains a controversial beverage, given the vast range of quality found in the end product. This particular koshu is as dark and musty as the room we’re drinking it in.
    We need a landing pad for all this rice wine, so we order the only food they serve in this joint: chunky miso from Wakayama, purple piles of pickled plums, and a strangely delicious cream cheese spiked with sake that pairs perfectly with nearly everything we pour.
    Nihonshu sneaks up on you. It goes down gently, floral and cold, coating your throat in the most positively medicinal of ways. There is no recoil, no heartburn, no palpable reminder that what you’re drinking is an intoxicant—just gentle sweetness and the earthy whisper of fermentation. The beauty and size of most sake glasses—scarcely larger than a shot glass—adds to the apparent innocence of it all. But once you get started on a proper sake session, with you pouring for your partners and your partners pouring for you and nobody allowing a glass to ever approach empty, it takes on a momentum of its own.
    Sake is produced in all but one of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures (Kagoshima reserves its distilling ambitions for potato shochu), and the early evening unspools into a liquid road trip. Nagano, Akita, Nara, Sendai, Okayama: we race our way around Japan, testing the harvest from every corner of the country, probing the borders with our tiny glasses, savoring the nuances of climate and topography: the snowmeltfrom the mountains above Niigata; the pristine waters that flow from the Katsura River outside Nara; the long, sunny days of Okinawa. A proper sake tasting will whisk you around Japan faster than the Shinkansen.
    Somewhere in this liquid fantasy my notes degenerate into a series of miso stains and sake splotches and islands of isolated adjectives, which grow increasingly abstract and aggressive as the night inches forward:
    Roasted asparagus . . . strawberry fields . . . liquid fireballs!
    You could lose yourself quickly down the Shimada rabbit hole, which is probably why it closes at 7:00 p.m. sharp. The owner hustles us out with a broomstick, and we scatter like drunk rodents under the white glare of the streetlights.
    â€œIf we’re going to make it to midnight, we’ll need some real food,” says Yuko, ever a beacon of wisdom in our hazy Osaka adventures. “I have an idea.”
    Osaka is home to a rich, closed-door dining scene, not just formal ichigen-san okotowari (invitation-only restaurants found everywhere in Japan) but clandestine spots in private homes and apartments scattered across the city. Madame X (she asked me not to use her real name, to protect her establishment) greets us at the door and ushers us into her apartment, a beautiful sunken space bathed in warm lights, with an open semipro kitchen and a bar with stools overlooking the action. Rendered chicken fat pops and crackles. A wok sizzles with blistered vegetables. Outkast bumps in the background.
    We crowd into a nook around a chest-high table with a view of the residential street below. Two men in their late thirties, charming, good-looking dudes still suited up from a long Friday, join the group. They both work for United Airlines, and it is clear from the way they make their wine vanish that this was a week they’d like to forget. “Wait, what are you doing in Osaka?” one asks me, a mixture of merlot and disbelief on his breath.
    Madame X returns to flood our table with a selection from tonight’s menu: fried tofu floating in dashi and covered with dancing bonito flakes, spring vegetables simmered in dashi and sake, and the house specialty: pizza coverd in shirasu , tiny whitefish. The conversation, as it inevitably does in the presence of this foreign journalist, turns to Osaka.
    Osakan fun facts ascertained during this stage of