I would like to write about fragrances [an entry about mostly Japanese incense | an entry about home written from the road | a final indulgence before returning to serious subjects]
A WARNING / _ I have not lived up to my promise. In fact, I would like to write more about fragrances. This is partly because I appreciate that style of overwrought sensory writing that some do well. I can’t pull it off, I realize. Pursuing other methods, I wrote about the pleasure of walking through an afternoon fair, reeking of vetiver and Lark cigarettes. I haunted junk stores to find antique bottles, then tried to write about Mitsouko and what we can’t recover from the ruins of our civilization. I tried to understand Soviet chypres and Abdulaziz al-Omari's advice to the hijackers to cloak themselves in Paco Rabanne. I wrote about the joy of discovery in spending an hour in a niche perfume shop on the third floor of a lesser Lumine, where I tried to decide between smelling of sawdust and lacquer, salt and roses, or fig and coriander. I tried to figure out fantasy Northern European allusions in Chinese-language perfume reviews. I wrote about the young women that work at department store perfume counters. I started earnestly on a report on the Korean perfume industry as a way to understand the brief craze for apple-scented body spray, mimicking security analysis, inserting satellite images of the Pyongyang Essential Oil Factory and the Institute of Perfume and Cosmetic Engineering. I wrote about collecting a vial of every Tom Ford version of cherry, so that I could spray one on each arm and my collar while I read a Kawakami Mieko microstory in Vogue about a man that smelled of one of them (they all smell about the same—variations on cherry pie filling, Cherry Skoal—so it does not matter which). ▬ ▬ Since I lack the language and the passion, none of this is of interest to hobbyists; it does not, I estimate, inspire much curiosity from anyone else. I still find it interesting. ▬
▣ IN THE FUNERARY DISTRICT | MORNING STAR-BRAND LAVENDER INCENSE ▣ Tokyo is built on bones. I know that this is a facile observation, and it could apply to any city. I think about it often, though. Maybe it is because cataclysms and mass death are not in the distant past. Maybe it is because thinking about those events takes effort. Maybe it is because that past was covered up so perfectly with postwar concrete. Except for the posters that go up on the neighborhood bulletin boards once a year, showing squadrons of B-29s over Taito Ward, there are few reminders that everything here, in the lifetimes of older residents, was turned to ash. This city of flat, gray sprawl was put down on top of it. You would not think about destruction while wandering the blocks of gaudy soaplands in Yoshiwara, but six hundred souls drowned in a muddy pond out back—and that was a minor event in a disaster that took the lives of hundreds of thousands. You can walk east from there, toward the river, where the untouchables stayed, on land allowed to them because they were visited by floods capable of wiping out in a flash everyone that lived there. If you walk to the north, to get into Arakawa means crossing the Kozukappara execution grounds, occupied now by a railway yard. Any excavation in the area turns up mass graves. The jizo at the west side were erected to watch over it all. If you had walked beyond that temple a hundred or two hundred years earlier, you might have been choked by the crematoria that operated in Senju. ▬ ▬ These are the deaths of many. They have nothing to do with me! This is arrogance, partly. It is also a lack of imagination. How could I conceive of living in a time that would add my name to a long, long list in an archive somewhere, of men killed when the city is destroyed again? ▬ ▬ When I walk in the funerary items district in Inaricho, death feels closer and smaller. And I have to consider what it means that it will come for me. The shops that line the main street between Ueno and Asakusa deal in urns and altars, tablets on which the name of the deceased should be carved, and Buddhist statues and Shinto home shrines. The culture is foreign to me, but someday that might no longer matter. When I go, I still want hymns and a mass, and to be lowered into the ground, with a headstone over me, but it seems likely that my descendants will also send me off and mourn me in their own ways. Maybe they will come to Inaricho. I must consider that someday people that I have not yet met will consign my remains to one of the imitation celadon urns that I have admired there. ▬ ▬ Let them burn incense for me. ▬ ▬ That is the reason that I go to Inaricho—to buy boxes of incense. I have not been in a while, I must admit. There was a shop I preferred, on the far side of the district, almost in Asakusa, most of whose business was in unscented bundles of sticks, but that also sold more modern scents. It closed in the middle of the pandemic. I bought Morning Star-brand lavender sticks. I like the faint smokey smell they left in the room; A■■■■ likes the way they smell in the box, before they burn, when lavender oil is more apparent, and the faint reminder in it of trips to Hokkaido fields, the sprig she hung at the head of her bed, my gift of ■ ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■. I like the way they look, hundreds of uniform sticks of pressed dark purple powder. ▬ ▬ Let me put it down here: when I have gone, when I can spend time pondering life as I once thought of death, they can burn cheap lavender for me. If Morning Star is too dear, the grocery store brand is fine. ▬
▣ PERFUMING A SPORT COAT | SHOYEIDO-BRAND HORIN RIVER PATH HORIKAWA ▣ There is a sour milkiness to the first ribbon of smoke that reaches my nose when I lean down to light it. It is not musk, but something else. There are spices—cinnamon and cloves—toasting in a pan. The warmed amber somewhere in there reminds me of the perfume once favored by older women. There is agarwood. I know there is frankincense. It smells pedestrian but holy. (I mean: the sacred should feel commonplace. It is good that there are more shrines in this city than there are convenience stores. It should not be surprising to find yourself wrapped unexpectedly in the sacred, wandering in the city.) ▬ ▬ I am sure that I saw once in a film a warrior of feudal times holding under his armor a censer with burning incense. I have no doubt of the existence of this practice. It existed in other cultures, too. Fragrant smoke is the reason that we scent ourselves with something called parfum. There was something religious about this—the fumigation of the armor—I recall, but it might also have been practical. Fragrant shavings of sandalwood can purify, but also drive out lice. I cannot remember where I saw an image of it. It has stuck in my head. ▬ ▬ I thought about it before I took this trip. I hung my sport coat, still damp from a soak in cold water in my bathtub, hanging on the balcony, and a wet iron, and burned under it ten sticks of Horikawa. I smelled it on the plane, a cinnamon smoke mixed with the decade of tobacco, cologne, sweat absorbed by the sleeves. I smelled it in the airport capsule hotel—a grand term for the local version, which was a low room filled with particle board crates—when I placed the sport coat over my head to block out the light. It might also keep away the bed bugs. This feels civilized but eccentric. ▬ ▬ Dust, spicy smoke, creamy French perfume. ▬
▣ INSERTED AS FILLER, A STRAIGHTFORWARD REVIEW | KUNGYOKUDO-BRAND MARUNOUCHI 1933 ▣ We can buy fragrances for only their names and then use them to decide what we smell. This is generally not true of Japanese incense, whose makers prefer more generic titles, or to name them after their ingredients. Even if they allow in more whimsical ingredients, the modern lifestyle brands do not often defy this. ▬ ▬ I expect some version of a modernist scent from a hundred years ago: concrete and steel, synthetic and organic at once. ▬ ▬ The smell of Marunouchi now is the fragrance of the upper lobby of the Shangri-La. It is the citrus and cedar room scents being demonstrated in department store shops. It is curry rice from a restaurant in the station. It is a smell not peculiar to the place. What is the feeling of the place? Pleasant, frictionless. What was the smell of Marunouchi in 1933? Charcoal smoke, I imagine. Exhaust from motorcars. The smell of human waste was there, too, I am sure, coming from the open sewers and the carts of night soil. Dust. Let me be more fanciful. Give me the scent of Marunouchi at its peak. What is the smell of the blossom of Westernization in Gothic brick, civilized city parks, and street cars? How did it feel? Give me that in a stick of incense. I want evoked the corporate powers triumphantly shaking off the recession. The Soviets made perfumes that smelled of Stalinist victory, so why can’t we have one that celebrates the sweeping aside of feudal remnants. Give me smoke that smells of civilization surrounded by backwardness. I want to hear in the distance headlines about starving peasants and men dead in Manchuria. If nothing else, give me a gray and modern fragrance of the past with which to fill the rooms I occupy in the next century, when all of that hope is gone. ▬ ▬ That is not the purpose, however. It is only an acknowledgement of the history of the building into which this ancient producer has located a shop: the Central Post Office, a landmark upon completion in 1933, was redeveloped as another mall for the periphery of Ginza. ▬ ▬ I smell cloves and sandalwood, but it is mostly soap and flowers. It is modern. It’s pleasant. ▬
▣ SMELL OF HOME | SHOYEIDO-BRAND HORIN AVENUE OF THE VILLA NIJO ▣ An entry has been deleted that was about some balance between being decadent in an age of enforced austerity, while also taking personally-imposed austerity as a virtue. If we are not careful, we can be pushed to live in ways that are mean. The answer to that is not to choose artificial replacement for what has been taken from us. This was a call for a type of decadence in poverty. I couldn’t explain what I meant. Was it only a call to master our drives? Was it only a reminder to resist ugly things and ways of living? Floating through the center of it were several images and stories: there were nude bodies at a public bath, breaking a fast with homemade bread, second-hand pocket books, a girl behind a bar in Sangenjaya savoring a midshift cigarette, and a trip to the gallery of a friend of a friend, where an artist sold in paulownia boxes body spray she made from pungent, musky Tibetan incense. It did not amount to anything. I thought of it again, though, coming home to rooms that smelled of smoked flowers. Let me imagine, oppressed by gray Tokyo, that I am the useless son of a Muromachi aristocrat, or at least a Mitsubishi executive, exiled to the summer home in Kanazawa. I can listen to incense. I can chase out the odors of drying laundry and grilled mackerel, at least. ▬
▣ INSERTED AS FILLER, A SHORT STORY | SANDALWOOD INCENSE ▣ The last stretch of sidewalk, clean, fresh gray, stopped there. A muddy shoulder began. Cars rushed by. Across the highway, the fields spread out in black mud humps, cut into sections by low fences, gravel roads, and drainage canals thick with blackberry cane. The fields ran until they met the Fraser, shuttered canneries, seafood restaurants, the Japanese rest home, and blocks of condos with their big windows looking out on the wetlands. She waited for a break in the traffic. She made it to the shoulder on the opposite side. She felt the wind that blew cleanly up the highway. It had no aroma. When it weakened, she could smell the fields and the incense from the temple. The sidewalk began again. It ran along the red brick wall of the temple, which was fortified by overgrown junipers. As she walked up the driveway, a man in coveralls was swinging the gate open to let in a black Mercedes driven by a man with white gloves. Curtains hid the passengers in the backseat. She followed the car up the driveway. On the lawn, plastic deer stood under low trees. A group of men in the gazebo of the temple garden smoked cigarettes. At a kiosk, an old woman sold incense. She carefully lifted a thick stick out of a plastic jar and then set it down. The woman at the counter said, “Daai heung.” She repeated after her. She selected a bundle of thinner sticks. There was a gas burner in a stone basin beyond, inside the first gate. She held the incense high over the flame. She went through the courtyard. Three Buddhas stood in a long box. She held the incense to her forehead and bowed. She liked the feeling that came to her. She was dizzy and serene. She focused on the white noise of the highway on the other side of the wall, and on the sound of her hair falling forward and back across her ears as she bowed. She left a stick in a burner in front of the Three Buddhas, then went deeper inside. There was an incense burner at the top of the stairs into one of the halls. The sign above it read: ONLY FOR OFFERINGS TO ANCESTORS. She prayed in front of the burner. When she closed her eyes, a memory came: her grandfather in his padded jacket, sitting up in bed, being fed by her father. She tried to clear the memory away, to think only of abstractions. She settled her sticks of incense into the ash. As she pulled her hand away, she felt a sting on the top of her hand. The ember of a stick of incense planted by somebody else had burned her. Her own sticks keeled over and hung on the burned down sticks at the bottom of the blackened grove of incense. There was a dark pink welt on the top of her hand. ▬ ▬ That night, when she put her hand in his, so that he could examine her burn, he smelled sandalwood in her hair. He thought of the moment years later, watching the smoke rise in front of Senso-ji. ▬