"I want to live, I do not want to perish gracefully in battle," declares Yamato (Tatsuya Fujiwara), the young hero of Hideki Noda's "Oil."

Unfortunately for him, though, he is recruited as an unwilling "volunteer" kamikaze pilot in the last months of World War II. His name -- not coincidentally -- is shared with the Imperial Japanese Navy's largest battleship, sent from Nagasaki in April 1945 with only enough fuel for a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa, but sunk by U.S. aircraft soon after it sailed. Yamato, too -- and perhaps most importantly -- is a name for Japan itself, and for its people who were first brought together as a nation in the third-century Yamato state.

In "Oil," a magnificent new work by Noda, Japan's most outstanding contemporary dramatist rises to the challenge of these themes and more as he tackles the universal -- and timely -- issue of war. In doing so, Noda does not trumpet antiwar slogans, nor is his stage bathed in misery and littered with dead bodies. Instead, his main concern appears to be getting the rudderless, gutless modern-day people of Yamato to do something they have never done, but which they desperately need to do: namely, come to terms with the causes of Japan's utter ruin in August 1945.