What happens
Wu I-Wan, the youngest son of a wealthy Shanghai banker, becomes a revolutionary in China while studying at university. Secretly meeting with fellow students who hope Chiang Kai-shek will bring a new order, he finds his father's household and his own loyalties increasingly strained. When his father learns that his name is on a government list of revolutionists, I-Wan is sent away to Japan. There he is taken into the household of the Muraki family, where he falls in love with their daughter, Tama. This is an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a Campbell Playhouse presentation adapted from Pearl S. Buck's novel, broadcast on April 14, 1939, with Orson Welles as producer.
Shanghai, China, and later Nagasaki and the Muraki estate in Japan, in the late 1920s
Characters: Wu I-Wan, Enlan, Wu, Pieny, Mr. Muraki, Bunji, Tama
Listen for: Wu I-Wan's growing divide between his revolutionary convictions and his privileged family, and the first meetings with Tama in the Muraki garden.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.