Monthly Archives: June 2021

Having hours to kill, for a moment I was undecided whether to return back home and then go out again later, or to spend the day in Yokohama. The decision was easy to make. There was no way I was going to be shut in on a day like this. A day off. Nothing to do. Glorious sunshine. A return to freedom. The shot finally in my arm.

So I just ambled slowly from spot to spot, reading Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, which arrived at the perfect time – an examination of all things Japanese, linguistic, social, psychological, very personal, and gladly surrendered to another person’s piercing mind for the day, ravished by the words and the ideas, sometimes putting it back down on the grass to just look up and watch the scene in Yamashita park, where I lay for so long in a stasis of one I got sunburn. People running; tai-chi against the backdrop of the ocean liners; rose gardens in full bloom; dogs leaping, the air alive with being.

Making my way through the park, people relaxed on the grass looking out at the water, lovers holding hands, old ladies chatting on wooden benches, (everything looks different when you have had the vaccine), I decided to mosey on down past Marine Tower and all the plush wedding hotels and have a look in Barney’s New York: a spacious, white, neo-art deco building I always enjoy a quick look in because of its prime location and marbled airiness; surrounded by space: on the top floor, you can have a coffee and cake in the cafe overlooking the sea (remember, Emma); hardly ever anyone in there; everything cool and white; ‘choice products’, rather than the onslaught of artificial lights, swirling crowds, and the intense novel mania for goods that is the commerce catacomb of Isetan Shinjuku.

No – in Barney’s, with its predictable quiet backdrop of light jazz standards, usually Sarah Vaughan, Chet Baker or Ella Fitzgerald, I could just move slowly, at my leisure, to the perfume counters, and (I genuinely felt different, the nano-technology running its course through my body; who knew what was going to happen; but I didn’t particularly care; I was just glad to be able to take my mask off and cherry-select just a few scents I didn’t know in a mindless state of day-lit, semi-somnabulant bliss).

Staring at the spartanly showcased shelves, it shocked me how many Roses De Rosines I was unfamiliar with (where have I been?)

I suppose I have neglected to smell the Ballerina series: though they have been out for a few years now, much as the frou frou of it all delights me to some extent (and what a perfect gift for a young daughter or niece) I’m not sure I have ever properly smelled this collection: perhaps I would have just felt like too much of a nonce picking over all the tulle and the netting to actually get to the nozzle, I don’t know. A man has his limits.

The Roses Absolument etc too – I love the boxes, that patterned embossed geometry: and let’s say I had a few thousand dollars to splash out on a frivolous whimsy, just for the fresh hell of it, I would probably have bought the entire series yesterday. There is something about Rosine: the perfumes themselves often very lovely, if not actually scintillating, but I feel they are somehow outside of the main niche frame; not quite commercial, not quite classical, something unsullied and porcelain that makes me just live in a huge glass house with a beautiful bathroom that has cabinets and cabinets to stock all of these bottles and boxes, so much so that you would never actually know how many you had or what was actually in there; lost in the mirrored madness of your luxuriantly oblivious purchases. To enter, and, on a flight of fancy, pick one particular rose, the one that has laid itself open for you, all the while enveloped in the fluffiest, dense white bathrobe.

The new, ultra-cute Rose Griotte struck me as rather delightful, as an example. I love cherry, and this is of course a cherry rose, but not done in the usual black forest gateau manner, all syrupy kirsch black cherries and oud. Non, non, cherie, this is a light and playful thing, with an ‘acidulous cherry taste’ that reminds me of the acerola juice drinks you get here in Japan, quenching with vitamin C: other fruit notes, Japanese nashi pear, cherry blossom, tangerine, heliotrope, jasmine sambac and osmanthus all contributing to make this a very pretty little perfume indeed. I think I want it.

Mon Amie La Rose is another very typically Rosine-ish light summer rose, with notes of bamboo and white tea, pear, lotus – you know the score – summery, refreshing and relaxing. Simple. Easy. Lightly aquatic. Perfect for the kind of young women who frequent Barney’s – an instant hit. I wouldn’t mind this one either, in the aforementioned imaginary Ali Baba’s cave of Pristine Endless Toiletry. Why not? After a nice bath, a spritz of a crisp, diaphanous rose can do the trick.

We like.

And as I was making all the right noises about the cherry, because it just felt so cheerful and perfect at that moment – the lone assistant – who I would give top points for being just helpful, friendly and knowledgeable enough; unpatronizing, polite and space-giving : cleverly directed me to the ‘sale section’, where a few Rosines from the evidently unpopular Les Extravagants were going for half price (still $150 though); the not dissimilar, similarly fruity Bois Fuchsia (and look at the boxxxxx……………..this has Neil Chapman written all over it: I love these 1920’s geometric designs………..) making me feel happy as a simpleton, in a blissfully childhood memory kind of way. Safe and cozy. Welcoming. A rather delicious combo of cassis, raspberry and litchi/lichee, iris, rose, and a sandalwood/patchouli finish I would have to test on skin before committing to (because you know how I am with woods), this perfume did something to me, and has lodged itself in my mind as a possible catch. Sometimes I like perfumes that are outside my pre-delineated territories.

Sampling the other three perfumes in the discounted Les Extravagants quartet, I found I was categorically not in the right mood for Vanille Paradoxe, a spicy ambroxan vanilla that I cowed away from; it is just not the kind of thing I am in the mood for right now. Too suffocating. Eloge Du Vert, a quite interesting scent centred around a very penetrating green peppercorn note, bolstered with other peppers and dry woods, rose and ginger, is a good option for those who really want to clear the air around them and get some zing, but I found it somewhat lacking in complexity.

Bleu Abysse, though, is what drew me in the most. I think mainly because of the sheer poetry of the name – those two French words together, which I find extremely beautiful, and which encapsulates precisely what many of us are slowly crawling out of now. This summer. An abyss. A blue abyss. Ulysses. The ocean depths – a seaweed rose. With mineral notes: algae, vetiver, elemi, incense, rose and bright citruses, this perfume strikes me as the furthest Rosine has ever strayed from its lovely, but somewhat narrowly rose-strewn path; darker, and more peculiar, the marine aspect of its athletic masculinity the one that somehow strayed onto my mask when I was reading, imbuing the day from that point on. Inspired by the scent of a particular species of French rose – the rosa moscata – a rambling rose on rocky shores, Bleu Abysse is a curious, rejuvenating dissident of the Rosine family that has struck a chord.

Diptyque scents have lost some of their bite recently . And the latest, Ilio, a citro-fruity jasmine fig or prickly pear number with Iris and bergamot, facets, is sweet and simple, but to me a bit sickly and nauseating. I had to wash it off.

Never mind.

I have just come from the vaccination center, after my first dose, via Diptyque, to the jungle garden on the roof of a Yokohama department store, where I am now celebrating the moment in the sun.

It is hot and humid. Lilies, hydrangeas, magnolia trees in full bloom : the torpid, leaf-tinged breeze bringing with it the scent of clouds; moisture, undergrowth, chlorophyll.

What could be more perfect in these close, sweaty evenings than to come home, shower, and find a stash of miniature vintage perfumes bought for a penny on the kitchen table? Shiseido Masumi, Soir De Paris Bourjois (never experienced except in parfum before: I love the aspirin / medicinal Savlon smell of it), a mini Nº19 edt….. but best of all, the green, delicate, chypric enigma that is Coriandre By Jean Paul Couturier.

Coriandre, in extrait, never quite clicked with me: the rose too dense and syrup-deep red; too concentrated, oily; insufficient freshness. The small eau de toilette D brought home for me the other night, however, is clearly the correct strength of this cooling, wily antidote: a perturbing, aphidic anointment of herbaceous angelica and coriander, drawn like a grass-skeined floral veil over a classic – (but light , this really goes with the June rains) – delicately chypric base of patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, civet, and musk. In edt, Coriandre is a dignifying, and distancing, scent that refreshes the senses: reaching out, and definitely ‘chic’; while also still retaining some privacy. I need a full bottle.

Kintsugi is a centuries old Japanese artisanal tradition of fixing broken cups, plates, and other pottery and ceramics by putting the pieces back together with lacquered powdered gold. In not attempting to hide the process but by emphasizing the imperfections themselves, this ancient craft is fascinating not only aesthetically, but philosophically. You can be damaged, but also more experienced, weathered – beautiful – as a result.

Flawed perfume Kintsugi, by Italian niche house Masque Milano, a rich vanilla Siam Benzoin with patchouli, amber, and a magnetic heart of violet leaf and suede, is a melange of warm, aromatic melancholy – a little too heavy and tangy perhaps- a full dose or big bottle might prove a little wearing – but I enjoy the scent’s general atmosphere, and will use it. Binding, and surrounding, If Zoologist’s Nightingale is Plum, this is coffee: soothing and invigorating. (Unfortunately, ‘magnolia’ is the ‘gilded glint’ in the broken pottery here – one of my very least favourite notes in perfumery : I am not overly fond even of the scent of the unreplicable flowers to begin with: in Kintsugi, the floral note is a creamy citric ‘brightness’ that is mercifully shortlived, until the main, habit-formingly accord comes into fruition.)

Strangely, and completely coincidentally (I was going to write something about this perfume yesterday but got swept up in the significance of the day), a piece in this morning’s international edition of The New York Times also discusses kintsugi, its metaphor very relevant to the current time we are going through. Writer Emily Esfahani Smith has some very interesting points to make about how we can reshape ourselves following this last year, whether by falling into negativity and ‘contamination’ – a path I have been in danger of following myself – or a more positive one of redemption. She also discusses psychology studies on the value of writing, on self-expression, even of our darkest experiences, as a tool to ‘opening up’ ourselves – and moving forward.

Now that we are able, or will soon be able, to start going out again and enjoying summer evenings in public, as places gradually,slowly open up a little, country by country around the world, cautiously pretending we are hunky dory and untraumatized, that first gin and tonic dissolving some of the residual fear, it is surely the time to start letting rip with our perfume collections. It was all very well spraying away at home as a kind of anaesthesia, a way of blocking the world outside and sealing ourselves within our own safely scented cocoons, but we know in our hearts also that perfume is also a form of communication. A way to connect to strangers without words.

I am already half planning parties in my mind for later in the year; looking forward to seeing friends and talking to them unreservedly without always looking at their mouth shape moving from under their masks: the whole ritual of bathing, dressing, scenting, heading out. Forgetting myself for a while and entering another person’s space. Smelling nice. And not only in subdued and elegant perfumes – those that let you try to keep a level head during times of insanity – I feel like some humour and flamboyance, something more gorgeous, to bring out the more gregarious members of the set.

Today’s semi-randomly selected trio of scents I have woken up feeling like talking about are not at all a bad way to celebrate the newly sociable world we will soon be re-entering.. Matiere Premiere’s Parisian Musc is a rather simplistic, but quite immediate, blast of what smells like figgy coconut but what is actually a syntheticconglomeration of ambrettolide, ambroxan, musk mallow, or ambrette, all wrapped around a fuzzy centre of Virginia Cedar. It puts me in a good mood; the D likes a daytime musk, and this worked well yesterday – just one dab to the wrist creating almost nuclear levels of sillage throughout the house as he ran up and downstairs and all around doing filming for his latest project: within an hour or so it had gone completely, and it wasn’t the most elaborate concoction, but I can still imagine him using this one as a social lubricant : just a dot to the skin before a meet-up with friends, and the transparent barriers that divide (particularly given that people have been so isolated and for so long, a little wary and trapped within their own membranes ) will immediately be mollified and softened. This is a friendly perfume.

Another genial fragrance is the new Lost Alice by Masque Milano, which also to me smells like a musky coconut (it must be this ambrette which has been very du jour for quite a while now; binding the biscuit in a way that threatens to take over any subtle flavours that allegedly lurk therein), in this case English Tea, Steamed Milk, White Roses, and other allusions to Lewis Carroll’s young heroine as she navigates the Hatter and all the other nutters at her hallucinatory party in the woods. While some reviews of this pleasant gourmand see visions of entire raspberry scones and teahouses, I myself smell something more akin to a Body Shop oil or a toned down version of Lush’s sandalwood-tastic Vanillary. Textured, but a little too fixed. Still, it is quite nice, cute, if a little monolithic, which wouldn’t nevertheless stop me from smelling it on someone walking by me at a restaurant and smiling quite contentedly. I know she might bring something new to the table: while my skin tends to bring things back to the basics, others bring out more faceted intricacies.

What I love about House Of Matriarch’s Coco Blanc, summer in a bottle, is the fact that it doesn’t pretend to be a conceptual compendium, relying on any gimmicks or superfluous ingredients or conceits to get straight to the point – which is a lovely natural sandalwood vanilla with a breezy cream of coconut and white chocolate running through it that is ethereal rather than sickly: the second you smell it, you either have the immediate desire to wear it, drink it, or, resisting its massoia milkiness – for me, this lactonic quality works perfectly, like solar oil on suntanned skin; others may find it a little too……….delicious; at least enjoy it immensely on another human walking by: there is something gorgeously, sarong-drifty exuberant about this scent: warm: a real mood booster. A perfume truly made for skin. For living, not for thinking. The time for mingling again, on beaches, at bars, on the streets, will soon be upon us: and if people smell like this, like any of these perfumes I am mentioning today, actually, I will be nothing but all for it.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2021/06/20/books/polly-barton-fifty-sounds/

I have met Polly Barton three times. Best friend of frequent collaborator Michael Judd/ Belgium Solanas, a film maker and photographer who wrote the infamous peacock piece on here as well as making my Martin video, I first met her at an all night party : Tokyo Witch Garden in Tokyo, where we tried to talk over the heavy metal band that was playing and exchanged mutually intriguing accounts about living here in Japan. An acclaimed Japanese-English translator with an almost fearfully intelligent gaze, she is the kind of person who tells it like it is – but beautifully. At that particular moment, I think she was about to leave Japan, a country she loves and is thoroughly addicted to, but also finds problematic (sound familiar?): sick to the teeth of being ‘othered’. Now (not entirely comfortably, it would seem ) based back in the UK, she has just published her first book, 50 Sounds, to rave reviews, already on its second printing and which also featured in this weekend’s Japan Times. We have just ordered it. I know it will be an intensely interesting read, and I am looking forward to see how our experiences of living here interlock, but also differ.

The second time I met Polly was at a screening of Michael and Polly’s hilariously surrealistic and comedic film ‘Crispy Kiss’ in Osaka, where they were running around giving out film-themed cocktails that were not easy on the stomach; even if the movie itself was very easy on the brain and eye. Later, there was a goodbye party and mass karaoke with people I didn’t know which was daunting for me; I don’t think I saw her again for a couple of years until she was back in Japan, dancing at a club night called Egomaniac where we were all going wild to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill as though part of a religious cult. A very highly skilled, precise but instinctively penetrating writer, I am fascinated by her story of moving to the Sado island, alone, ‘fresh out of Cambridge’; of having an affair with an older married man there; becoming gradually more fluent and inextricable, the similarities of our ‘in-betweenness’, both ‘Japanized British’, the most glaring and important difference being that 50 Sounds is the story of her immersion in the Japanese language itself (I, in great contrast, shamefully, can’t even write my own name in the most simple of syllabaries, katakana) ; and how this experience shaped and changed not only her life but even reorganized her own consciousness.

To enter Japanese is to enter a mindset – perhaps why D and I have resisted – a gendered, hierarchical, highly complex series of social elaborations and written and unwritten rules that makes speaking English feel comparatively like eating a bag of chips. We have never managed it. I am certainly ‘conversant’, enough to oil the hinges, to communicate, but have never properly endeavoured; neverly truly sunk my teeth into it. In truth, I was never especially studious. At school I was academic, but lazy. My record, movie and perfume collections have always been more important. I still accrue vocabulary, at a glacial pace, but essentially gave up long ago. (Not entirely true……I have to speak it every day; we have had language lessons intermittently over the years, but in our hearts knew that it was never really going to happen. I just find it impossible to produce fluently from my lips. It doesn’t emerge. There is no well I can draw from. The language just does not ‘fit’ my brain; it won’t enter). I find it beautiful; it is beautiful: to look at as well, so I can’t deny my deep jealousy of Polly, a brilliant individual, in having not only mastered Japanese, to have gone down the full ‘rabbit hole’ the way she has in entering the psyche and the internal linguistic mechanisms ; how they express themselves at the soul level ; but also to be able to render Japanese literary works in effortlessly lucid prose in English – a true bridge between the two — even if she has been ( fortunately or unfortunately ), irrevocably altered in the process.

D E L I R I O U S (a celebration, and exploration, of all things jasmine, featuring: JASMIN DE NUIT by THE DIFFERENT COMPANY + ACASIOSA by CARON + JASMINE ATTAR by AMOUAGE + VENT DE JASMIN by IL PROFUMO + VELVET DESIRE by DOLCE & GABBANA + OPHELIA by HEELEY + A LA NUIT by SERGE LUTENS + IKAT JASMINE by ERIN LAUDER + JARDIN BLANC by MAITRE PARFUMEUR ET GANTIER + FLEURS D’OMBRE JASMIN LILAS by JEAN CHARLES BROSSEAU + VOILE DE JASMIN by BULGARI + IMPERIAL TEA by KILIAN + FIRST by VAN CLEEF & ARPELS + ECLAT DE JASMIN by ARMANI PRIVE + WHITE JASMINE & MINT by JO MALONE + JASMINE FULL by MONTALE + NIGHT BLOOMING JASMINE by FLORIS + GIANFRANCO FERRE + SARRASINS by SERGE LUTENS + LA REINE MARGOT by LES PARFUMS HISTORIQUES + LUST by GORILLA PERFUMES + LOVE AND TEARS by BY KILIAN + GELSOMINO by SANTA MARIA NOVELLA +PALAIS JAMAIS by ETRO + JASMIN ET CIGARETTE by ETAT LIBRE D’ORANGE + CAROLINA HERRERA + LE JASMIN by ANNICK GOUTAL + ORIO by MONA DI ORIO + SAMSARA by GUERLAIN + JASMIN ROUGE by TOM FORD + JAZMIN by LE JARDIN DE JIMMY BOYD + OLENE by DIPTYQUE + SONGES by ANNICK GOUTAL + EVA EVANTHIA’S INDIAN JASMINE )

I went in to work yesterday to be asked:

” Have you heard about the vaccine? “

” No. What’s happened? “

“If you want it, you have to sign up today, and you can get it as early as Monday”.

“What?!”

I was loopy: ecstatic. Amazed.

“What? Really? Oh my god. YATTA!! YES! FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!’

I will admit I did dance a little, and even sang the chorus of Handel’s Hallelujah, but quickly felt dampened by the muted pressure in the teacher’s room. A sense of……… this is an uncomfortable topic. ‘It is a delicate issue, so we must not speak our thoughts openly in case we offend another person’ type of deal. Dullsville, thought I. Christ. Jesus. Can’t I even have a moment of unadulterated excitement, just once, at such a historic time, when all I want and have wanted and have been able to think about for over a year like most rational people is getting this shot in my arm so I don’t have to think about it any more? Why isn’t anyone looking especially pleased? Not now.

The news couldn’t possibly have come at a better time. I was almost at the end of my tether this week, truly starting to lose it. Worryingly so, D telling me I was going to have a heart attack. Stuck on a 50 minute train ride in crowded conditions, on Wednesday, ill-advisedly reading two terrifying articles in the New York Times about whole neighbourhoods wiped out in New Delhi, bodies left on the streets uncollected outside houses, utterly awful;the personal experience of a top Japanese-American surgeon who was touch and go on a ventilator…….by the time I got to my destination I was gasping like a lacerated fish. I had a meltdown; tachycardia. A feeling of not being able to take any more. Of nothing happening. Of just going on in this numbing but perilous situation and feeling permanently scared.

So I had decided to take action. I started making plans with a rebellious and unconventional Japanese colleague and friend of mine at the company to get the vaccine by hook or by crook; by any means necessary, even underhand. Lying if necessary. I didn’t care. Fiddle the system. I had to have the vaccine. And that was all. We were planning ways to go on a ‘vaccine adventure’ to the mass inoculation sites in Tokyo in Otemachi and take our chances. Find a way. ( I am only half exaggerating). I really have felt that I have been getting very close to the edge.

So to be told – out of the blue, no inkling that we would all be immediately eligible – that what I have been aching; desperate for, had suddenly, unexpectedly become a reality was like a boulder being dislodged in a river. Heaven. Which is why I found myself tearing up intermittently throughout the day; emotions surging through. To me, it is beyond obvious that vaccination is the way to get us out of this situation: the statistics prove it; epidemiologists and virus specialists are adamant about it, it is common sense; obliviously simple; but no: the three people sitting nearest to me told me with a slight sense of embarrassment (but also I thought I detected some form of pride as well) that they were definitely were not intending to have the jab.

‘Really? My god, I am so excited. Why?”

Seriously? And each gave his reasons: wanting to ‘wait a little longer’ (????!!!!!!!!!!! with the Olympics around the corner?) : a nervousness, a profound sense of caution and wariness of side effects: three out of the six present. In the school I went to afterwards nearby, two abstainers out of seven, one unsure. No one happy. Heads down, working. No one exuberant, apart from me. Just a normal day on the job.

I had no option but to completely block them out of my mind. I was screaming to get out of there, but also too happy to be exasperated any more. I have so much anger stored up in me and it has affected my health. I just want to get back to normal, to teach – which I do actually enjoy – without feeling asphyxiated. To see their faces again. To not have to think about respiration. Surely this should now be a turning point, a move in a more wonderful direction. And, up to a point, I respect the vaccine skeptics’ decisions. I do think that declining the vaccination is their choice: being forced to be injected carries a certain level of moral repugnance for me. That goes without saying. The whole ‘I control what is put in my body’ movement is neither ideologically left nor right; it is more a deep personal conviction, the drawing of a personal line in the sand. ‘You will not inject me with an unknown substance that could be hazardous to my health when up to now I have been fine as I am. Just in my mask. Going on as usual’. I know it’s up to them. Personally I think it is completely stupid, mind you, and reckless, given that we are teachers FFS but you know, I was too much in my own moment – and what a moment it was, yesterday! – to let myself be touched too much by all this excessive caution, passive aggression, possible xenophiba (it is not a homegrown vaccine) and stubbornness. If they want to get corona, fine.

,

Later on in the evening, after terrible lessons – I just wanted out of there: (D was meeting me later for cans in the park): I can’t think of another time in my life when I have more wanted a >>FFWD button, to just fast forward to the night; I just wanted to breathe and be alone or with him and celebrate this fantastic news. This feeling of total exhilaration.

Before leaving, I had to go up to the head office to have someone help me fill in the application forms – the procedure itself has unfortunately been put off by a week, due to some logistical issue, even if it is still possible that I could still have it as early as next Saturday. But just the fact that there were application forms to fill had me beaming from ear to ear; the reality there in front of me. My Japanese supervisor’s eyes were brimming with glee as well: no mask can hide such happiness. He had a real bounce in his step, a sense of YES. FINALLY WE CAN GET OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE.

‘Are you having the vaccine?’ I had said the moment I walked in.

‘Mochiron.’

Of course.

As if any other option could only have been formed in the mind of a total imbecile.

I couldn’t stop talking when I met D. I talked his ear off, blabbering and swigging back beer, feeling an unloosening. A panorama expanding. And when we got home, we sat on the balcony, where I have been slowly constructing a lush, tropical garden with a coconut tree, banana, pineapple, orchids, birds of paradise, hanging plants, our private haven (if you can’t go out anywhere, you make your own world). He fell asleep with the soft rain falling beyond, just the sound of water on leaves and the smell of the air, and then eventually went to bed. I myself ended up sitting there all night. ALL NIGHT. Until dawn. Just lost in my thoughts, feeling the rain pattering; my heart opening gratefully to the scent of Madagascan jasmine.