Timely or what! Just as Japan's autocratic leaders appear to have junked war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution -- with news last week of SDF aircraft even having transported armed U.S. soldiers into Iraq -- along comes "Taiko Tataite Fue Fuite (Playing Drum and Flute)," which vividly portrays the average citizen's helpless confusion as the government committed the nation's last great military mistake.

Set in the 1930s, this play, which garnered several awards for the Komatsu-za theater company in 2002, takes the form of a biography of the popular authoress Fumiko Hayashi (1903-51), whose checkered life has inspired several stage works, notably Kazuo Kikuta's 1961 "Hourou-ki (Wanderer's Story)." That play -- which shares its title with one of Hayashi's novels -- covers her eventful love life as she shot from obscurity to acclaim, and still regularly packs the Nagoya Chunichi theater with veteran actress Mitsuko Mori in the central role.

In "Taiko," however, playwright Hisashi Inoue, Komatsu-za's founder and the current president of the Japan Pen Club, is concerned with Hayashi as a woman rather than a star, examining her middle years when the traumatic changes in her outlook reflected those of postwar Japanese in general.