When she woke up, and I suggested it, I saw a new glint in her steel-blue eyes. She hadn’t been expecting this. She had probably been planning to follow me like a secret agent, complaining about those ‘darn Japanese’, cursing me out loud, and here I was offering her a completely different prospect. She merely said, ‘Thank you,’ looked down to hide her emotion, then said, ‘So, what do we start with?’ I told her that I hoped she had a strong stomach, because we had a lot on our plate. She gave a gleeful laugh that I found completely unrecognizable.

And we went out into the singular warmth of that winter’s day in Tokyo.

11

23 to 22 Days

My Mother as a Maid in a Karaoke Club

‘Anniiiiie aime les sucettes, les sucettes à l’anis . . .’

We were in a karaoke bar in Shibuya, the trendy district that never sleeps, and I think the surreal image of my mother, dressed up as a saucy maid, screeching France Gall’s cute Lolita number about loving lollipops, a song which she hates, surrounded by Japanese in high spirits, chorusing ‘Kanpai!’ at the end of every line, will remain etched in my memory forever.

Naturally, it occurred to me to capture that magic moment for posterity. I had difficulty filming because I was in fits of giggles, which made the camera wobble. At one point, one of our fellow drinkers grabbed the camera, and his friends gave me a second mic and pushed me on to the mini stage. My mother, who generally doesn’t drink and who’d been downing glasses of umeshu – a moreish plum liqueur – yelled that she was very happy to sing this duet with me, grabbing me by the neck, like a drunkard at a village beer festival in Alsace, and shrieking even louder when Johnny Hallyday’s ‘Que je t’aime’ came on. That night, we discovered that Japanese karaoke bars, as well as being places of wild drinking, are veritable museums of international music hits, and that the French pop songs of the Sixties to the Nineties are a big favourite.

The day had begun a great deal more calmly. We’d followed Louis’s plan to the letter, and I piqued my mother’s curiosity by disclosing each stage only as we came to it. So, for her, the day had been a series of surprises. It was the first time she’d been outside Europe, and only her third time out of France, and she was like a kid, impatient to find out what was next. She relied on me, because I both had the schedule and spoke English – for want of Japanese – and I had the feeling that our roles had been reversed: I was the mother, travelling with her child who was carrying a senior citizen’s card.