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Our tour group was small and about half the members were young, which was unusual for a package tour from Japan in those days. One night the attendant suggested to young members that we should go dancing with him after adults retreated into the hotel room. We had great fun and it had become a custom that the attendant had taken us to a club at every city we visited since then. We had become good friends. One of the club-goer group was the junior high school boy who was chosen as a king at a medieval-themed restaurant in London and with whom I was paired as a queen. He was a geeky king there, and now he had changed into a frenzied disco king. Once he started dancing, he lost control of himself, veering out of our dancing circle toward the center of the dance floor and spinning on his back on the floor. At every club, people gave him a mockery look, as his dancing was somehow rustic and geeky there again. On the last night in Italy, adult members of our tour group asked the attendant to take them to a club too. He took all the members to an elegant lounge in a different hotel. I sat with the young members and the adult members, including my parents, sat together a little apart from us. We were chatting at the table because the music was too mellow on the dance floor there while few adult members took courage to dance. My mother was one of them. Since my father didn’t want to dance, she was dancing with some other foreign tourist. Suddenly, one of my friends shouted, “Look at your mother!” We stopped talking and looked toward the dance floor. My mother was kissing the foreign man on the mouth. In Japan, people don’t kiss in public. It’s almost taboo. I’ve never seen my parents kiss even inside the house. All the tour members saw it and gasped. I spontaneously looked at my father. He was watching them kissing with a wan smile. Then he looked at me and gave me the same smile. After the long kiss, my mother triumphantly took the tourist to our table. I glared at them and told the tourist that all of us at the table were her children. He laughed. I had never felt so strongly that my mother was filthy. I was ashamed of her so much and felt like crying. I knew my parents didn’t love each other but in Italy, what my mother did and how my father reacted made it certain…
