NEW YORK -- Yet another round of Chinese and Korean protests against Japan for allegedly downplaying its past deeds in historical reconstruction came and went (or almost). This time, though, I was reminded of one thing I should have remembered from four decades ago: China used to turn a completely different face to Japan.

The memory refresher came about in a roundabout way. I was looking at the detailed chronology of Yukio Mishima (1925-70) when I came upon an entry saying that a play based on "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (Kinkakuji) began production. The date was May 5, 1957. The novel had come out only in October of the previous year, but the brief time the novel evidently took to be transformed into a play wasn't what surprised me. Mishima was a celebrity author for some years by then, and many things were done to ride that celebrity crest. What surprised me was the identity of the playwright: Tomoyoshi Murayama (1901-77).

When I was studying English and American literature in Kyoto in the 1960s, I knew of Murayama only as one of the writers of "period fiction" (jidai shosetsu) -- comparable to stories about cowboys and gunslingers of the American West. Being an English major, I naturally looked down upon them as unworthy, though I read, surreptitiously, some of the weekly installments of a writer particularly known for his "nihilistic" depictions of a preternatural swordsman prone to sex and savagery. So when I learned 40 years later that one of these writers was also a "serious" playwright, I decided to check, and found that he was as much a man of theater as Mishima, and more.