Tokyo's comic eye on London

She helped to popularise karaoke, but we can learn to forgive her for that. She made daffy toy animations of blockbuster cinema long before Adam and Joe were a twinkle in the eye of their camcorder.

She runs a record label called Eggy Pop, and has sung with the pop group Frank Chickens for nearly 20 years. She has had her own TV series, made a documentary about her life in Tokyo, and turned her experiences of a bi-cultural island lifestyle into a performance art trilogy.

Perhaps most importantly for capital dwellers, she has also been, since 1978, Tokyo's comic eye on London; a magazine columnist and author of three books of essays on her life in the home town of James Bond.

She is Kazuko Hohki, and she has, I suspect, a selection of discs that would get Sue Lawley running from the studio. I have no idea about her taste in books, but I am fairly sure that her luxury would be her home computer animation kit: "I really recommend this hobby of animation for all retired people," she tells me earnestly. It seems that from Kazuko's point of view, she is already on her desert island, for when I raise my eyebrow at the idea of her being retired, she gives me a twinkle of happiness. "I feel as if I retired as soon as I came to England, because I have just been doing what I wanted to do," she says, before assuring me that she nevertheless works very hard and earns her own money.

Casting away to England seems to have been a happy accident for a self-proclaimed Japanese misfit. "I was a student in Japan for a long time because I felt I was ill-adjusted to Japanese society and I was trying to cure myself," she confesses. "In 1978 I came to England as a tourist and I just stayed on here because I really liked the lifestyle; lots of people were squatting, and doing art. I became a tourist performer and then just carried on. I had wanted to be an artist since I was a child in Japan. Here I could choose to be an artist."

Her family has a fine heritage of stage work. "Performance seemed natural to me - I grew up watching my mother performing; it seemed to me a way to be happy," explains Kazuko. What she doesn't mention is that her mother was a rare breed indeed: a comic priestess for a modern Japanese religion. "I grew up a really big fan of my mother. We felt deprived of her because she wasn't at home, so religion became quite a big enemy for me and my brother, but I loved her performances. Seeing my mother so strong was great - she was a master of comic timing; she had a really great skill."

It is this contrast between her mother's private identity and her on-stage persona that forms the basis for Kazuko's performance work, Toothless. Mixing live animation, toy theatre, videos, stick puppetry, storytelling and, naturally, karaoke, Toothless is an extraordinary confection based on the two years of the comic priestess's sickness and eventual death. Originally forming the first part of Kazuko's solo trilogy, the show has built up a steady cult following and has now been reprised for a long run in Battersea Arts Centre's Matters of Life and Death season.

"I had wanted to do a mixed-media show for a long time, but I didn't have a story to tell. Then my mother died and I thought,'This is my chance!'," Kazuko explains, customarily deadpan. "Doing a performance is fundamentally to entertain an audience - you shouldn't just indulge in your bereavement - so I hope people are entertained as well as getting my point of view. Making people laugh is a very good way of communicating."

Toothless is not actually a comedy show, although it does have very funny moments. Rather than trivialising her mother's death, Kazuko's bizarre on-stage props and dry storytelling style make for an evening of disarming, and distinctly un-chicken, frankness.

? until 2 July at Battersea Arts Centre, SW11, 020 7223 2223. Post-show discussion on Sundays.