The Black Narcissus

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. 

A gardenia appeared in the front garden a couple of days ago. It doesn’t look like much now, but it was planted by Jiro, our landlord’s son who is a landscape gardener and sometimes works at the Meigetsuin temple and other places down the hill, attending to the famous hydrangeas and shōbu irises in the ‘secret’ back field – so I feel confident he has put it in the ideal place.

Is there any chance it will flower this year, or will I have to wait until next? The smell of gardenias in Japan is so raucously delicious I always find myself pinching them from neighbour’s gardens even though I know it is illegal. It will be ravishing to have a gardenia of one’s own. 

just going to go and see if that big bottle of caron infini cologne is still there

You never know if you will relate to people you have only communicated with previously on the internet, but I trust my instincts and Pissara Umavijani of Dusita Parfums and I got along like a house on fire. We had a great time together with her friends at Seryna, a high end Japanese restaurant where they delighted in crab shabu shabu and I went through my beautifully made multi petite course lunch set knowing I shouldn’t really be eating anything at all feeling a little bit dodgy to say the least. Still, the atmosphere was fab, gifts were exchanged – I received the new upcoming release and I gave her a bag o’vintage classics and a kimono cushion sewn by d in return (who was still in bed with the thing I must have contracted) and couldn’t attend.

The lady likes to party, as do I, even though I was beginning to feel rather dire. Still, the show must go on, so off we went to karaoke where I had a true chills down the spine moment singing Britney Spears’ heartbreaking ballad Every Time with her up close which segued naturally into Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, both divas refusing to relent the mic as we sang out to the dusk of the Tokyo skyline from the window like Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation.

Elated but bilious – I know she could have gone on a couple of more hours at least – I said my goodbyes in the Ginza night not hugging anyone as i knew for sure at that point I was sick – and dragged myself like a slow drugged skin sensitive hot sloth through the streets to Tokyo station where I promptly puked my guts up in the disabled toilet. Haven’t done that years but it was kind of interesting : emesis definitely = catharsis.

Not being able to move from the bed yesterday, feeling fragile as an incense stick, the day and the evening swirled striking and vivid in my mind’s eyes and nose brain. It was an extraordinary day of extremes, intensely memorable, and great to meet in person sometime whose perfumery and character I admire: we turned out to have a great deal more in common than I had realized and I know that we will meet again.

Blimey sometimes I forget just how posh Ginza is. Should I buy my jewels from Chopard, Cartier, Boucheron or Harry Winston? It troubles me. My dress from Vera Wang?

Ginza is a jewel in itself.

About to have lunch at a very fancy looking wagyu beef shabu shabu restaurant in the basement of the Tiffany building with Pissara Umavijani from Dusita Parfums – d was supposed to come as well but is ill in bed after some dodgy shumai dumplings we had from the convenience store Thursday night cue fainting and collapsing etc. I just realized it is in fact Saturday, not Sunday, but am too lazy and in a hurry to change the post

Our cat Mori, as the toupeed asshole, who I heard has just started selling bibles.

Apparently the first perfume to be officially approved by Alphonse Mucha, the Bohemian Art Nouveau artist must be doing very well at the grand age of 164. Forgive the sarcasm. I am always a little skeptical about brands basing their wares on the licensed names of artists – think Salvador Dali, Parfums Andy Warhol etc, the inspiration often runs thin, but this Tokyo based new house has opened its main shop in the Yurakucho district of Ginza, where we swooped in for a much needed hungover brunch at our favourite Chinese Dim Sum restaurant on Sunday, Kamonka Ten: I was quite intrigued by the look of the premises, and after nourishment we decided to take a quick peek.

The Mucha store is very Mucha. The Czech painter, whose flouncy decorative overstatement is a flourish of overstatement – or somewhat beautiful – depending on your perspective, is of course the design basis for everything in the shop, from postcards to soaps, hair oils, combs and other fancies as well as five fragrances and their ancillaries. In the state we were in, intense aromachemicals were not quite the mood, but I did rather take to the iris, particularly the soap, which gave me a rush of white marbled pleasure I remember feeling when I first smelled Crabtree & Evelyn’s lovely Jojoba.

Allergic to repetitiveness, be it visual, aural, olfactory, I get really bored of seeing classic paintings I have seen too many times before. Van Gogh irises and sunflowers: NO. Dali melting clocks: meh. The ‘new’ Warhol portrait print shirts that were hanging in the Comme Des Garcons Ginza branch – dull and uninspired. Tea mats with Mucha : yawn. But go deeper into any of these artists’ oeuvre and you can find surprises anew. I loved the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and saw new works there, and therefore Vincent, from a different angle. The Dali retrospective we went to at the National Art Center in Tokyo many moons ago was SPECTACULAR – I was reborn. I can’t look at any more soup cans or Marilyns, but Andy Warhol too, when you dig deeper – I love his paintings of shoes and flowers, for example – can still stimulate. Art can become commercialized to the point of pasteurization: you become unseeing, tired. A bland exploitation. Sometimes you need a different context.

A rainy day in Prague, 1993. My friend Hilary and I were totally exhausted. Our flight from London had been delayed twelve hours. We had then had to make an emergency landing midway in the dangerously icy fog that we were passing through in Bratislava, and take a night bus for the rest of the journey. It was only a weekend trip, and we had lost half the time we would have there, and were a bit crestfallen seeing that we were doing it all on student budgets, but Francis Ford Coppola’s gorgeous, brilliantly hammy Bram Stoker’s Dracula had only come out the year before and was still deeply obsessing me, so while she slept, I was secretly spellbound in a moonlit thrill watchingr the landscape pass by vampirically all night, another eight or nine hours unsleeping as we came into Prague at the break of dawn, all shrouded in dense fog – The Charles Bridge, with no tourists in the bleak icy grey, utter perfection.

Later, we had coffee and cakes at the Kaverna Obecni, an exquisite turn of the century municipal building partly designed by Mucha: I remember the stained glass windows, leaning into East European bliss in the deliciously warm coze. It had been a (literally) bumpy start – but now we were finally getting the real Prague we had been hoping for. It was wonderful. When I saw this shop, therefore, in Tokyo, on Sunday, I had a moment of flashback. Totally decontextualized, a little phony, but they had just about carried it off. There was still a flavour. The little combs, you could imagine Sarah Bernhardt using backstage: the powdery iris heliotrope raspberry of the Iris scent was Belle Epoque enough to convince. I will definitely need a soap or two and will take it from there re the edt. The ‘Camellias’ struck me as a little too typically modern floral vanilla – you have smelled this thousands of times before – but it was still quite warm and pleasing. If a waitress at the Mucha cafe were to drift by smelling like that, carrying my Viennese whirl and a piping hot milk coffee on her tray, I know that I wouldn’t complain.

THE HALL OF MIRRORS……….Parfum d’Hermès parfum (1984) and the matchless attraction of extraits.

I LOVED wearing vintage Parfum D’Hermes tonight.

I’m just not sure that anybody else did.

I am digging this. A slick, sensual and buttery affair dressed perfectly for the luxe sarong, Vanille Des Afriques Intensivo is an ideal holiday perfume for sundown on the terrace.

Beginning with a surprisingly animalic, floral fresh funk of jasmine absolute, osmanthus and magnolia oil segued with coriander and pink pepper, as the vanilla beneath makes its self known immediately richly swimming in a slow, amberesque ooze of orris butter, vetiver, sandalwood and musc : the effect, opulent, a little dirty, is like fresh ylang ylang flowers plucked at their most pungent directly from a tree (I still wish we had gone to the island of Nosy Be in the north of Madagascar, when we had the chance, where the vanilla absolute for this perfume is sourced)

D lived for a while in Tanzania, and would like to take me back there one day to show me his old haunts. I would love to too, especially to visit all the spice fields on the island of Zanzibar. It sounds fascinating. I have no idea what an African sunset is like – the vibe that Ormonde Jayne is hoping to evoke here- but there is a sultriness and dark sweetness to the scent that reminds me of Chopard Casmir; Scherrer Nuits Indiennes and Patou Sira Des Indes; all erotically inclined sandalwood ambers for the sybaritically rich and idle taking indolent advantage of their glorious surroundings. Well put together, huskily voiced: a little self satisfied : sexy.