GOODBYE TO OUR LOCAL SHISEIDO SHOP, AND BYE BYE TO 2023

Our two local Shiseido shops closed down today. One a short bike ride away, the other, just round the corner.

(Our local shopping street: we live just off to the left from the brighter of the green shop rooves )

photos by d

The place - very handy – will be missed: (I have actually written about this shop and Shiseido on the Black Narcissus before).

The piece was entitled ‘The Secret Perfumes Of Shiseido’ and detailed our extraordinary discovery of an old box containing all the extraits of the original Shiseido perfumes from the 50’s onwards in an old junk shop in Yokohama and then taking it around to the Shiseido shop around the corner to show the proprietress its contents. Far from the glamour of Nombre Noire, Tentatrice, Rivage, Murasaki, the legendary Inouï, the beautiful Suzuro, let alone Feminité Du Bois, once Serge Lutens got in on the act of actually ‘creating’ perfumes for Shiseido, not just their stupendous maquillage, the local shop, where yes you could buy soap – I have just bought up their last Rosarium bath soap, see top picture, as well as a bottle of Koto Cologne - like Aramis arranged in a bath of cyclamen –

(our last purchase, just before I started writing this!)

(I left the bottle Tactics as I already have one)

-was (‘was!‘) actually more of a local tuck shop where, surprisingly, you could buy crisps, spaghetti, cakes, as well as all the daily essentials like toilet roll and washing powder, aeons away from the glamour of the urban Shiseido parlours of Tokyo, and a place where the lady gave knitting lessons and sold envelopes and batteries.

(yes, this was actually a Shiseido licensee)

It is sad when a place you have known so long closes their shutters for the last time, but then again what used to be a thriving shotengai or local shopping street has gradually, over the years, become a ghost town (tonight we are going to our ‘Japanese family”s house for New Year’s O-Shogatsu celebrations - they were once the prime greengrocers of the area) until a Tokyo movie company began regentrifying it all a little bit in recent times, with a couple of cafes, a very fancy fish shop collective, ‘vege-clubs’, local festivals and the like: things now feel comfortably like a mix of the old and the new. You can’t stop change.

Which brings me to 2023.

This has not been a good year.

Firstly, just in world terms. What can I say? It has been horrendous.

October 7th and its aftermath I haven’t been quite able to formulate words for, but I feel intensely for both sides, wherever that puts me on the political spectrometer: I pray that things are resolved as soon as possible and the bloodshed stops. Likewise Ukraine. With fascist autocrats gradually gaining power in Europe, and with Him poised to take power in the US in 2024, it is not easy to remain optimistic about the future of the world, when so much of the world now regularly, literally goes up in flames. These palpably are, on many days, very ‘end of’, worrying and distressing times.

From a personal perspective, it has also been a bad time for me. Childhood traumas and unresolved issues from the last forty years have been resurfacing this year and last, and my blood has just basically been a cauldron of poison and cortisol for the past eighteen months, quite seriously affecting my mental and physical health. In truth, this backdrop has limited my ability to do much perfume research into new brands and the like, as to a large extent I have just been in ‘survival mode’ doing the bare minimum to get by at work, where I certainly haven’t given my all as I simply have not had the sufficient levels of energy, even if in terms of human connection – with Japanese colleagues and students- I would say it has been one of the best years in my career. And that is certainly not nothing.

Thankfully, I am glad to be able to write at this end point in the year that after a great deal of pain, honesty, forced clarity and just….communication from the heart, real forgiveness and healing on all sides are happening now and will continue to breathe right into the whole of 2024. I have always believed in the new year as a chance to start afresh – clichéd as that might sound – but, when you have been sinking in the quagmire of your own bullshit for so many years, sometimes you simply have to make changes, rejig the cosmos; try to put all of that past behind you, and move on. And I am truly ready to.

ALL OF THAT ASIDE, SOME GOOD THINGS IN 2023

1. D and I had some, no many, fantastic times together in 2023. And I feel very lucky. We had our massive 30th anniversary party in June, a big success; it has all worked whether we are just slobbing at home with the cat, doing the shopping, eating gyoza, or out dressed up for wild extravaganzas. He definitely seems to have done more art/ cabaret performances than ever this year (Burning Bush has also put on a few shows, which were rather exhilarating) and I always enjoy the ritual of the suitcases filled with paraphernalia and heading out to Tokyo for an often literally underground show.

2. D and his best friend Yukiro’s movie Spoiled Identity had its premiere this year in the big city and people loved it. There will be more private screenings, some final edits, but the final product will also hopefully be shown at a Tokyo independent film festival in 2024. I absolutely loved being part of it.

  3. . Horticulturally, it was a good year: YOU CAN’T HAVE TOO MUCH VEGETATION.

  I am no plant specialist, but I have truly enjoyed having our ever expanding ‘tropical balcony’. Many of them we have brought inside for the winter now, creating something of a jungle feel upstairs – which I of course adore – but I intend to keep buying new plants next year and continuing the rainforestation of our house into 2024 and beyond. I need this refuge.

4. And speaking of tropicalia, WE WENT TO HAWAII.

This was of course the main event of the year: my talk, The Language Of Flowers, at the Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Museum Of Art, as well as a work shop the following day on Scent Literacy. We got to see old friends, met a lot of new fantastic people, got loads of perfume, and were surrounded by pikakes and plumerias. It was gorgeous. Admittedly, it was tough on the nerves, and I was still consumed inside with The Other Thing – I didn’t actually relax while I was there – but, at the same time, smells, sights, visual images have kept seeping back into my consciousness at unexpected points during the year and I realize that though my energies were focused on trying to do a good job with the events, I was absorbing it all nevertheless. While Waikiki was not our cup of tea, ultimately, the beach we drove to with Christopher and Christine along the coast was just like heaven

5. We also went to Singapore

At the time, in late August, I wrote a long piece on our experience in this unique city state but it got lost in the ether with one mis-press of a button (oh the stress of technology, sometimes, my lordy, and I couldn’t gather the energy to do a replacement piece).

We did really like it though and want to go back. It was different from what I had imagined. More down to earth; lived in; relatable. The National Orchid Garden was resplendent; Little India and Chinatown charismatic and just up our street, and I also found my favourite perfume of the year there – a roll on attar of sambac jasmine whose name I can’t even remember that I used in next to no time; indolic, sheening, alive, gorgeous, it cost next to nothing – I need to go back again next year and fill up my suitcase with them for the future as I was wearing it everywhere back in Japan in the warm weather, to work, on weekends; the extreme soliflore jasmineness of it all just made me ecstatic.

6. We connected properly with old friends

It has been a very good year for friends. Catching up and having proper talks in England (I usually prefer one to one) when we were there in August: I realized that, eccentric fellow that I may be, my relationships are real. They always have. And they usually last forever.

7. We bought an air fryer.

Yes, we may be late for the party, since the entire UK seems to have gone crazy a long time ago over these contraptions that let you cook things with less oil – and goodness, I definitely do need to cut down on the calories – but on a whim we ordered an air fryer that happened to arrive on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day we had planned to do a traditional roast chicken lunch, but ended up a tone of wine and listening to tons of records in the kitchen/ living room (utter heaven) to the sparkle of Xmas lights and, experimenting with the air fyer, didn’t actually get it on the table until 11;35pm. While there may have been flare ups about the level of cookedness – I am insanely fussy about meat and fish being exceptionally well done, anything less makes me sick – in the end, after getting all the settings right and making up, we had a very delicious midnight feast.

8. We got an espresso machine

A gift from some of my colleagues at school for the aforementioned anniversary, how could we have been living all these years without homemade, deliciously frothy, cafe lattes? I have quickly become the barista of the house, and it did take some trial and error with the frother overheating and splattering me with boiling ] milk or the coffee granules exploding all over the shop (and I do think that ‘drip coffee’ as they call it here, as in filters, is healthier in the long run in terms of blood pressure and antioxidants), but, still, a perfectly hot, properly frothed up brew in the morning really does start the day perfectly.

9. My senses were satisfied.

I am fortunate in having the ability to completely lose myself in aesthetic, cerebral and sensory pleasures. (Without this inbuilt propensity I don’t think that I would be alive).I am not one of those who just have the TV on in the background (we don’t even have a tv, thinking about it) or halfheartedly watch a film at the cinema, put on a record, or lackadaisically smell a perfume on the back of my hand. No. I have been immersed all year in films and music and perfumes. While I might not exactly have had my finger on the pulse of all the latest releases, fragrance-wise, you know what, I have come to the well earned conclusion that I really don’t really care. I am happy with the perfumes I have. And I get excited getting new ones. This is not to say that I am not curious for what next year might bring, but in terms of trying to keep up,I have stepped off the merry-go-round.

10. I loved writing The Black Narcissus.

Online writing is supposedly a dying artform/media mechanism these days, but I am just not designed for YouTube and TikTok : I have no desire whatsoever to make videos and be seen all the time and just find both of them totally exhausting. Just too much of an introvert at the end of the day, despite being presumed to be the opposite. I am happy, and hope you are too, with just spontaneously writing posts on here whenever I feel like it. About whatever comes into my head. I cannot exist merely as a promoter/advertiser of other people’s products and start every vid with a ‘hi guyyys!’ I am more likely to turn into an elephant.

11. I love writing full stop.

And will be doing much more of it next year, particularly for my book on Japan. It has been too long in the making but enough is enough.

Things were derailed; I was derailed, as so many of us were, by the pandemic (my friend Kunihiko was saying this the other day when we went out to the local izakaya for his birthday about his panic attacks and health issues that suddenly seemed to appear at that time : ‘I don’t know, I just went wrong during that period’, and I knew exactly what he meant; for me it is strange that even talking about the coronavirus now has somehow almost become taboo, old hat ; ‘we all went through it and so therefore there is no reason to talk about it’, but I personally disagree with that shove it under the doormat approach as I think each person’s problems were often specific to them: people really suffered; I know that I went mad, all of it documented, (un)fortunately, on here, and because of that (or because of swanning around Honolulu Chinatown) projects got shelved or delayed; it is great, therefore to have the sensation of being able to move forward and make progress. I have been writing like a maniac just this last week: I really want to encapsulate what it has been like living in this culture for so long. I want to share my story.

So thank you for continuing reading, or just tuning into, my sprawling baloney, The Black Narcissus, which will be in its twelfth year in 2024. Thanks for indulging me, and for all your insightful comments; I am looking forward to continuing the voyage with you next year.

Health and happiness

N

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