FITTING IN…….AUSLESE by SHISEIDO  (1978) + NOBILE by GUCCI (1988) + SPIRITO by MEO FUSCIUNI (2019) 

I go back to work on Monday after a wonderful spring break during which I have had a great balance between quietness and concentration on home, writing, and some wild nights out. Reality is hitting the fan though, or at least it ought to be, and I am in need of a smartening up so yesterday morning we went into Ofuna, marvelling how truly ugly and profoundly banal the plastic grey and beige Japanese suburbs can be architecturally as we got off the bus and made our way towards salariman megastore Konaka to get me a new suit (yes, of course in an ideal world I would be getting one made by Saint Laurent or some other fabulous garment producer: ideally, I would have my own personal clothes assistant in the form, say, of Kristen Stewart, just like the character she plays in Olivier Assayas’ brilliant Personal Shopper) but I live in a very different financial universe and the one I ended up getting, black as always, was by an actual London tailor I checked later – or rather, he had licensed his name out, which is still better than some of the fake Italian suit brands you get here who are actually based in the Japanese manufacturing zones. It fit. It looks okay.  

Scent wise, I was in the mood for something male. This is very rare. I just can’t do that profile any more. But the Shiseido lady continues to throw stuff out – how much product does she have; how many objects has she accrued over the decades?! We keep scoring with choice kitchenware, notebooks, bizarre ceramic animals and other tchotchkes  – and of course old perfume and cosmetics. She was getting rid of an Auslese shower cologne from the seventies which I thought I would give a try; I can do a herbal green manly aromatic much more than I can a typical fougère, whose aggravatory truisms evoke true detestation in me now to the point of phobia and madness; this is pleasant enough, and precisely the kind of thing that retired ex Japanese businessmen continue to wear when they play golf with their old buddies and their worried, strategic combovers. I wouldn’t not wear it again. 

It reminded me a bit of something: ah yes, Gucci Nobile, an ultra macho Italian eighties hey baby hardbodied casanova kind of a scent, which I have reviewed before and do rather like as a kind of cosplay; I had a little on my right wrist as a comparison to the Shiseido on the other, which faded quickly. Nobile just kept getting stronger, but there is a white powder under all the green and granite that is indeed kind of noble, although again, once the novelty began to wear off I could feel it slightly getting to me, as we sat in the cinema in Sakuragicho watching Laura Poitras’ brilliant documentary on the photographer Nan Goldin, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival but which has only just come out here. A tripartite film that examines the artist’s tragic childhood, blossoming into a fearless pioneer of documenting her own life and that of her friends in the underbelly of New York in the 70’s and 80’s, it is also inspiring on the political level; she was one of the first people to try and bring the Sackler family to account for their knowing and willing role in the opioid crisis; as the makers of Oxycontin, which Goldin herself become addicted to and almost died from, she led a group of protesters who would occupy art galleries – which often featured her own work, as she has now long been an art icon – funded by the Sacklers. It couldn’t have been more riveting – I could happily have watched a 28 hour version as I was so fascinated by every single person in the film –  nor more scuzzily, darkly glamourous, even if the perfumes rising up from me at this point, now in Yokohama, not the greyness of the burbs, were starting to grate. 

D was wearing Meo Fusciuni’s Spirito, a neo-classical take on the masculine fougere, a trope, that just won’t go away, although in truth, thank the lord it has never really taken off in Japan and men here simply don’t smell like this, only barbarian foreign tourists. The beginning is nice; very sylvan, green, herbal, with cypress and hyssop and angelica; carrot seed and myrtle, elemi and chamomile, a convincing start. But by the end….ugh. Unlike the gentle but resilient beautiful creatures on screen, we just smelled like billiards. Blokes. Boring as old hell. Every once in a while, I would catch some Parfum Hermès, with its roses and ylang ylang and costus amber musk, rising up from somewhere – had D some got on his bag when we were performing a couple of weeks ago? Was it on a scarf? Wherever it was coming from, it filled me with a strangely soul deep sense of yearning.