Taken in summer sunshine, it showed him in sports shirt, radiating all his extraordinary charm. However, the altar instead of bearing the usual candles, incense, sacred Buddhist objects and images was covered with a spectacular display of flowers, fruits, vegetables, fish, wines and sake.

There was something so wonderfully clear, pure, bright, vigorous and pagan about it all – the inimitable spirit of Shinto – in the midst of a Buddhist rite.

Mrs. Moroi, an exotic beauty in her forties, greeted us dressed in a mauve, Western-style gown. Standing beside her were Masa's son and daughter, both in their early twenties. Mrs. Moroi distributed beaming smiles with a total lack of self-consciousness.

That smiles should accompany death is an old point of Japanese – or, at least of samurai – etiquette. "Masa wished it like this", Myriam (that was her Western name) said.

She invited us "to have a good time and enjoy ourselves and be gay, drink, dance, sing". She reminded us that "his spirit will rejoice if you rejoice". We moved around, slightly dazzled by it all. "Moroi est mort, vive Moroi!" said a French voice.

I mingled with the guests, and all of us, as it turned out, had been similarly moved. When the last person had paid his respects, we were invited to sit down for the feast. We took our places at tables that have been gorgeously set.

Food was abundant, conversation reach, lively, polyglot, spicy. We drank wines from as far away as Bordeaux and as close as Kofu, at the foot o Mt. Fuji.

Soon the ecumenical wake was in full swing. The curtains concealing a stage at one end of the rule were drawn aside and, before we could get over our surprise a ballet ensemble -- some 20 dangers, actors and singers -- had launched into an entertainment.

During a brief interval, an Englishman sitting next to me said that he had once attended a similar funeral in California but, he added, "It came off very poorly we were all embarrassed." He wondered why this one should seem so natural. Yes, why?

That was to set us thinking. The two wakes reflected, we decided, two entirely different concept of death. In our society with his Judoe- Christian base, it is impossible to cavort with death on such familiar, confident, intimate terms.

In the Christian mind at least death is a gate leading to final judgment, and woe to those who take it lightly.

But in the Buddhist view of things, death is a trail to be confronted many times along the path of psychic migration; the way may be hard for all. but the final goal – Buddhahood and deliverance – shines like the sun, inviting mankind onward.

In the Shinto view, death leads to the world of the kami, where gods and mortals mingle and interfuse. Both faiths permit death to be taken with a smile, an inevitable link in the chain of generation- destruction-generation.

And so, Masa's funeral became his jisei, his deathbed poem – written not in words, but in people, music and dance.

We were his ideograms, his thoughts, languors, dreams, hopes. When the show was over, the curtains were closed. After the applause ended, there ensued a few moments of silence and darkness. Then the curtains parted again. There, bathed in green light, stood a young couple – he in dinner jacket, she in a long white gown, holding a bunch of flowers. I recognized the boy immediately; he was Masa's son.

Mrs. Moroi addressed us from a microphone at her table: "Dear friends, I am performing my duty and following Masa's last wishes. This is Sada, our son, whom most of you know well, and next to him stands Yuri – his fiancee from this moment on. Their marriage will take place in the near future. May they be happy forever!" She stopped abruptly, tears in her eyes.

We all clapped. Yuri was delightfully petite, coy in her movements, accustomed, it would seem, to floodlights and publicity. She was, I was told, a singer. "Yuri, Yuri, Yuri," her young friends began to chant. "Sing something for us. Come on, Yuri. Yu-ri, Yu-ri, Yu-ri." Yuri nodded. A microphone was brought to her.