My wife was worried about her parents’ empty house, so she spent her weekends driving to a village outside the prefecture. While she was cleaning and maintaining the empty, rural Japanese-style house, a grinning, burly man who looked like a down-to-earth farmer and who lived nearby approached her. “No one’s going to come to this rural place anyway, Mrs.,” he said. “Don’t be shy, just come here, just the two of us.”