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SCENTS AND THE CITY1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
This dish, called Aroma Pot, is one of 12 theatrical courses tonight at Aronia de Takazawa, a brightly lit avant-garde food atelier. It’s an early stop on my scent safari of Tokyo: exploring the city with my sense of smell leading the way, using that most animal of human senses to describe the most civilized of places. Yet I half-expect to find nothing, thanks to the intrinsically Japanese penchant for the absence of scent. Like impeccably fresh sashimi. Or a pristinely hygienic Toto heat-and-blow-dry lavatory. Or the perfectly distilled essence of nothing that was my old boyfriend’s Japanese brand of cologne. The Japanese scent palate does prove to be highly subtle and refined, though it’s far from absent in the orderly chaos of Tokyo. The Tsukiji fish market, where I ate meltingly fresh sea urchin at the Daiwa Sushi counter, smells of cigarettes and diesel. At Niigata Shokurakuen in the upscale mall Omotesando Hills, the air is thick, almost sticky, with dry rice, which I’d always mistakenly assumed to smell benign. On a postcard in a trendy boutique in Shibuya, I read, “A flower without a smell is like a man without a soul.” Right. “The Japanese tendency is much cleaner, softer, less overpowering – simple in a pure way,” explains Yosh Han, a young San Francisco-based Japanese perfumer I speak to after smelling her unusual fragrances, like Kismet and Stargazer. “The Japanese have a palate so subtle, they even have a word for the texture of flavour.” This kind of synesthesia – a crossing of the sensory wires – is not a bad metaphor for Tokyo. It’s a place where the fumes of downtown gridlock border fresh green parks, where you’re curiously alone walking in sidewalk seas of black-suited salarymen, feeling the noise and smelling a driven urban desperation. In the cool lounge of the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, I sip the signature 88 cocktail from a champagne flute. The mix of a 1988 sake, chestnut liqueur and maple syrup has the light, fresh smell of its lime-spiral garnish; the taste is dense Christmas cake. I later inhale intense juniper in the hotel’s wood-lined sauna. Three days later, in the steam room of the Four Seasons Marunouchi, I swear I catch the same whiff again. Is it a scent or a brush of heat and homesickness and soft evergreen? I try to identify each plant-derived potion during a Kenzoki Sensorial Variations treatment at the exclusive two-room spa at the Four Seasons while lying eye-masked and prone. A fresh green-smelling mask that might be cucumber? (Bamboo leaf.) Cool dabs resembling menthol? (Ginger flower.) A floral that seems lavender-like? (White lotus.) A rich unguent that reminds me of shea butter? (Rice steam.) Two hours of birdlike fluttering and tapping of tiny fingers later, I’m stymied, clearly lacking an adequately evolved smell vocabulary. The pun behind the name of the incense boutique Lisn in the chic Aoyama area has to be explained to me. The Japanese refer to their ancient kodo ceremony as listening to incense, smell borrowing a word from sound. A rainbow of beakers full of coloured incense sticks decorates Lisn’s counter. Light aqua is labelled in tiny letters as Passing by a Lady; leaf-green is called Tears, and Crystal Winter is warm grey. On a small screen, a DVD called Meeting in the Forest plays; the sounds and images come with a complementary incense kit for a complete sensory experience. The clerk urges us to peek in on the kodo bar next door, which has the low tables of a tea shop but with unfamiliar implements – a feather, a metal spatula and small black discs – at each place. Intrigued, we call upon the Bespoke Tokyo concierge service to locate an English-speaking practitioner to guide us through the ancient incense ceremony. |
