Recently, a friend of mine bought a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes for his mum — she wore them at her funeral.

Mourners, shuffling past the coffin, apparently agreed they looked great.

If this story makes you raise your eyes to heaven, it’s possible you’ll be converted by the Japanese black comedy that won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar 2009.

Departures wants to make you see the benefits and the beauty of lavishing affection on the dead.

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a failed, debt-ridden cellist who, in an attempt to downsize, heads for his now empty family home by the sea — his father abandoned the family when Daigo was six, and his mother has died.

When Daigo is offered a well-paid job at the NK Agency, he imagines he’s signing up to be a travel agent — but in fact, his job is to collect the dead then tenderly prepare them for burial.

His boss, Mr Sasaki (the brilliant Tsutomu Yamazaki), is soon shoving cotton wool up Daigo’s anus for the purposes of a training DVD — “this prevents seepage”, he explains.

He also takes Daigo to clean the corpse of an old lady, left stewing in her own juices for two weeks.

Daigo’s friends are horrified — in Japan, it is taboo to touch the dead — and treat him like a pariah. Daigo wonders if the gods are punishing him for leaving his own mum to die alone.

But could this nightmare job be a blessing in disguise? Director Yojiro Takita is not always a friend to subtlety. Yet his film is devastating.

The script provides a string of shocks, making us look twice at, among other things, Daigo’s everyman face, his wife’s pliant smile and seafood.

“Even this is a corpse,” says Mr Sasaki, holding up a grilled piece of puffer roe. “The living eat the dead. Unless you want to die, you eat. And if you eat, eat well.”

He may prize reverence at work, but Mr Sasaki is basically an iconoclast, a Nietzschean realist, the point being that life, as much as death, is an unsavoury business.

Yet Departure’s cynicism, ironically, is what makes the optimism of its last act so moving.

A word of advice for those who find it embarrassing to cry: keep a tissue at the corner of your eyes. This prevents seepage.