"I don't think there is another nation of people in the world like the Japanese. In Britain there is coal in Wales, but Japan makes up for the lack of such a place with an abundance of national will and national sensitivity ... a people's most hard-to-come-by resources. (These are) the country's biggest assets."

Those words were written by one of the most remarkable foreign writers to visit prewar Japan. He published two articles in the Asahi Shimbun, on March 31 and April 1, 1926, that were to form one chapter, titled "The Sound of Geta," in a subsequent book whose publication led to his murder 12 years later.

The writer was Boris Pilnyak, a Soviet novelist and adventurer who was wildly popular in his day. His visit to Japan caused a voluble stir, prompting the police, wary of this "communist" interloper, to follow him around the country. The left-leaning magazine Kaizo offered him its pages to write about Japan; the progressive feminist journal Josei carried four articles about him and his work in its May 1926 issue; and even the mainstream monthly Bungei Shunju took up the visit of this eminent envoy from the world's only socialist state.