Masaaki Yamada (1929-2010) is like a mystery man of modernism. He apparently had no specialist art training of note and is known only by a skeleton biography that is mostly blank before 1943, and patchy thereafter. Said to have begun painting from the so-called tabula rasa of bombed out World War II Tokyo, his unforgettable memories of conflict forced him into a covenant with painting in which he sought meaning and direction in a world he could control.