Everything in Japan is chocolate right now. After all the standard predictabilities of the imported Halloween, Christmas, and then the old traditions of New Year, we get The Great Chocolate Brainwashing come the middle of January as women rush frantically to buy the fanciest French artisanal chocolate presentations to give to their friends, coworkers, and maybe, if the are lucky, even a lover: It has become the tedious commercialized norm now to buy tons of chocco of varying degrees of quality for the men in your life, sometimes your female friends and colleagues as well, even if in sheer monetary terms thankfully things are changing now a little, year by year, and there is no longer quite the demand that there used to be for the dreaded giri-choco, or ‘duty chocolate’, where office ladies who probably hated their foul breathed chain smoking eye-bagged bosses were forced to hand over prettily beribboned chocolate boxes with a fake helium titter, daintily back-heeled kick, and elaborate smile.
I / we don’t really celebrate Valentine. I just found an old piece just now I wrote, from five years ago, ‘My Funny Valentine’, in which I detail how the other half and I usually feel at this time of year (uncannily accurate still!) and what perfumes I love to smell him in : we have quite similar but also different tastes in most things - especially scent – but we did both immediately take to this rather attractive rose perfume by Thai indie brand Tada Parfumeur Rose And Thorns, when we were going through some new samples last Saturday, even if I am by far the more likely of the two, with my more flamboyant olfactory tastes, to actually wear it.
Thankfully this perfume is entirely chocolate free (I have never liked cacao notes and roses together : recently I wrote about some of the excellent Darren Allan perfumes I had been trying, whose Jonquille I am pleased to see was named as one of the best perfumes of 2023 by Cafleurbon, but in that piece I didn’t include the sickly Cupid’s Bow, an amalgam of plasticky roses and cheap chocolate that feels as though it had been snapped up quickly at a truck stop convenience store and left on a pile of glossy real estate magazines : it made me feel really queasy). Rose and Thorns has a far nobler mien, but it does, at its heart, also have undertones of a quite sweet and candied amber musk, a charming, uplifting coumarinic violet base, that puts me in mind a little of the original La Rose De Rosine – a perfume I have always loved as a frou frou pantalooned party gal - :an eighties version of cancan danseuses at the Les Folie Bergère.
There is a darker side: what is lovely about Rose and Thorns is its inherent dualism. As its name would suggest, there are thorns here in the rose thicket, not only sweet love blooms, and the beginning of this perfume is actually quite solemn and grave: a dark crinoline bustle of Bulgarian roses and ether; powdered and mournful as Victorian soap. The effect of the two contrasting sides of the perfume combining is quite powerful: a romantic immediacy, as well as a potent diffidence : as ideal for a Tokyoite loligoth teetering in platforms in Yoyogi park, as for a quieter, older person, in need of a solitary thick rose seething. Rather than piles of overpriced, overpackaged Godiva, or mini trays of extortionately expensive cutesy artisanal cookies that tip the whole country into diabetic crisis – I get such a mind-mouldy sugar depression just looking at all the conniving tack — personally I would much prefer to receive a nice solid perfume like this as a gift on February 14th - or in fact on any other day of the week.
After my Nina by Nina Ricci post the other day, my mother saw it and went straight upstairs to try out again a bottle I gave her years ago that was somewhere on her dressing table, but it had turned. Sadly, this is one of those more-sparkling-than-thou fragrances that naturally cannot remain in perfect intactness over the years; there will always be a slight, or complete, fading that inevitably takes place when the scent in question was such a champagne supernova in the heyday of its initial release (Nina bottles that go, really go, turning to meaningless alcohol).
What I forgot to mention the other day, though, because I had actually forgotten this myself, was that the heavenly parfum I was mentioning in that extended Nina piece was actually doctored: if you read my scandalous piece on messing with antique perfumes yourself by adding essential oils, ‘THE YLANG YLANG TERRORIST’, you will see precisely what I mean. If I recall correctly, my now currently favoured Nina that had been kept inside one of my perfume closets for a good few years was a dusky faded parfum with potential I had once discovered in some recycle shop or other with the addition of another pristine-ish edt I found, and some high quality bergamot oil that I had added to it and then left to macerate on its own terms to create my very own bespoke parfum de toilette . You must know : some perfumes respond BRILLIANTLY to bergamot: and Nina is one of them. It is as though a fairy tale prince had been revived to life by the magical addition of just one drop of water: Nina will respond in kind.
Serendipitously, I had spotted the two full bottles you see above, on the shelf at ‘my shop’, the slyly glamorous woman at the counter smiling like the Mona Lisa as I walked in (“here he comesagain” she must have been thinking to herself). And seeing that they were very reasonably priced, to put it very mildly, (₤8.50 each) I decided to get both after la mère had said she would like to have another one. Later than I wanted to be for work – this was a bit of a naughty detour – I quickly put both in my coat pockets, carefully screwing on the bottle tops and zipping them up to boot (the eaux de toilette don’t have the beautiful and fetishizable crystal stopper of the parfum, but they are certainly, with their portability, much more practical for an incorrigible Mr Bean such as myself: arriving to work drenched in faded ballgown floral aldehydes would not have gone down very well with anyone in the building).
After work, on the train platform, I of course couldn’t resist trying them. The first, the clearer of the two, was in extremely good olfactory condition and brought back instant memories. Its aldehydic freshness; its feminine athleticism, were completely on point, with all the floral, woody and green facets scintillating properly in unison – perhaps a tad more fleeting than it should be, but I know that Judith Chapman will rock this one to absolute perfection (no one I have ever encountered wears this genre of perfume better). The other bottle had changed its colouration over the years, and some animalics had become more prominent, along with some of the deeper, more forested aspects of this composition, but it was also more androgynous and sexier somehow, and better for me with all the alluring chypresque aspects I have been enjoying vastly in the parfum – which I have been wearing on the sleeves of my cashmere sweaters with a great deal of excessive pleasure this last week- I just love the final accord and the drift that the final sillage gives off. Also, me being me, I did happen to have a fresh bottle of bergamot on my person (as you do: I find a drop on the back of the tongue at the mere tingling of a sore throat nips it in the bud - a piece of old Italian wisdom, where in the Northern regions il bergamotto is considered a panacea for virtually every ill). I knew, on smelling that second bottle, and remembering the citrus bergamia, that I just wouldn’t be able to resist.
Sure enough, before I even knew it, I was sat on the train in my four person seat adding bergamot to dark Nina. I would like to say that I slowly, judiciously, added three drops, checking each time – but I actually just thought fuck it and put in 25. While at first sniff I thought uh oh, what I have I done here, this was merely the perfume giving off alarm bells that it was under severe citric attack and didn’t know what had hit it – by the time I had got home and put some on to go to bed it was gorgeous. The following morning, on instinct, I then put just a little of this bergamotized variant into my mother’s bottle and voilà! It is virtually good as new.
Now, I don’t want to be getting lawsuits from devastated readers experiencing the olfactory equivalent of Perfume GBH (“but you said it would make it better!!“). I am not a cautious person by nature but for other people I would recommend some caution and common sense if you are handling a precious artefact that could potentially be ruined by the addition of an extraneous component that wasn’t in the original mix. However, I do know from my own experiments over the years that a little bergamot - which, after all, is a major component of this perfume – can work absolute wonders in stirring ingredients in the process of stagnation back into a new form of wearable vitality.
The gauziest of the gauzed, the softest, most feminine angelic of the soapiest soap – Nina, the original from 1987, was the sole creation of perfumer Christian Vacchiano, a floral aldehyde masterpiece of extreme, crystallinic beauty and shadowy powdered underpinnings of chypre.
Though in many ways a ‘typical Ricci’, what is important to realize about Nina is that it was quite a bold move to release a fragrance of this type at this particular moment in history. While Cacharel’s chaste white lilies portrait of misty-mirrored proto-70’s innocence, Anaïs Anaïs was still being worn by quite a lot of people, chastity in scent - if not in the public discourse on sex- was generally going out of style, and Nina was a prim, eighties (very) classical floral aldehyde: seemingly a contradiction in terms when such perfumes were anything but du jour. Constructing a ‘pillar of femininity’ type fragrance in the mode of a Van Cleef & Arpel First or Hermès Calèche, must thus have felt dated and anachronistic to many upon this perfume’s release, when the fashion of the time was for big and bold strokes of acrylic colour – the ogre-like gorgeousness of Obsession, Poison, Loulou and Giorgio Beverly Hills, perfumes that were intoxicating as hell but quite grimly potent to the wrong inhaler. Nina was fantastically demure and conservative in comparison; you might even say reactionary (Reaganite – there is something stolid within despite the wiles): a conscious step back to try and reclaim some ‘womanly grace’.
This is, I believe, the key to understanding Nina. There is a very elaborate, complex, parodoxically ‘powerhouse’ aspect to the perfume that distinguishes it from the lighter, deceptive simplicity of other exquisite Ricci flower meisterwerks from the 60’s and 70’s such as Capricci and Farouche (all of the alabaster vestal virgins of antiquity from the other golden years of the house are also prettily beautiful, such as Fleurs De Fleurs,the ravishing Coeur Joie (the feral Fille D’Eve - see my review – a bestial outlier, salacious in the extreme); but Nina feels fuller, richer, duskier, in comparison, despite its very carefully spun light – the base notes of oakmoss, civet, vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood, iris, musk and ‘blackcurrant syrup’ alongside an interesting note of Indian bay laurel creating a crepuscular darkness that exquisitely offsets the luminousness of the green, fresh citric and aldehydic opening (leaf notes, bergamot, basil, blackcurrant bud, marigold and delicate peach), a celestial chorus as precedent to the complex floral bouquet of the heart – rose, jasmine, ylang ylang and violet, naturally, but also bright mimosa : the whole as gloriously executed as an Italian renaissance sculpture in white marble.
Nina is both showy, and cool; recondite. Quietly loquacious; not shy, physically, but a little secretive. Vacuous? Possibly. A little. I am not sure. Perhaps she is just conforming to her archetype: a performatively understated femininity. But there is still, despite this, a lot going on. You can think what you like about her, but you know you will ever only be knowing at most half of the story; she is keeping a lot back: quite consciously. And this is precisely why you are drawn in, the toile veils in the advertisement above (‘A perfume must be a work ofart‘), draped over the timorous and decorous young ghost bride rendering her untouchable; an explicit indicator of the intricate webs that are deliberately being woven. While Nina will probably feel much too traditionally ‘ladylike’ to some people, too passively unfeminist and Nancy Reagan white-floral-dress-garden-party, to me, while understanding these concerns, this perfume for me is at once an object of beauty (I adore the bottle; the extrait edition’s crystal glass stopper an ergonomic delight) and something of an olfactory marvel.
Yesterday I woke up craving it. We were going up to a friend’s housewarming party in Tokyo - sometimes I forget how big the city is; in a residential area in the North East, more affordable, we left our house in Kamakura at 11:30 am and didn’t get to Chie’s new apartment until 14:30 – a full three hours of different train lines and buses- but the large doses of Nina parfum I had emanating from my wrists, a fountainhead of green leaves and soap and Grecian engravings in cold stone, were giving me life in the stark Sunday urban atmosphere. In truth, I am not sure how much of my emotional reaction to this scent is intrinsic to its aesthetic inspiration and artistry alone; perhaps the strong feelings evoked come because I do associate this scent with a particularly happy summer in 1987 when my mother had started wearing Nina - one of the great things about working in a department store every weekend was that she was always in contact with the very newest releases and would often buy them, much to my obvious delight (and actually did, also, incidentally, wear Nina, one hot July day, with a hat and floral dress and white hat for a day at the races at Ascot); to me, now, all these years later, the perfume still gives a dignifying feeling of calm and refuge, a maternal caress.
I don’t know. Despite Nina’s slight obviousness (Mitsouko and Miss Dior and Ma Griffe make snide remarks regarding her intellect: First and Calèche have snobbish class issues, other chypric aldehydes gloat and close their eyes in distaste and won’t even mention the upstart’s name (Arpège is having none of it……..) – all these perfumes are, ultimately, at the end of the day, just jealous because Ms Ricci is so much more floaty and alluring and actually liberated – happier in her body – than they will ever be). Nina is Nina. She knows what she is. And I think this is why I find this perfume so uniquely calming; there is an assurance; a place I can hide in tranquillity and find rest. One August night, a few years ago, after teaching a hard schedule and not hydrating enough, in the evening after work around midnight I was suddenly floored with a rather excruciating pain in my back – semi-immobilized by a kidney stone. Groaning and in the beginnings of agony, D called my Japanese friend from next door who came round immediately to see me writhing on the futon not sure what to do. It was a toss between calling an ambulance, which I found slightly too melodramatic given the non lethal situation, as the whole neighbourhood would have immediately come out of their houses in their pyjamas and street slippers to see, red lights flashing; I couldn’t bear all the fuss – and a taxi, to take me down quietly to the hospital. Before the latter arrived, I had managed, hauling myself along the tatami mat, to stretch my hand out to the perfumes next to my bed and grasp the one I wanted – Nina, by Nina Ricci, and only Nina by Nina Ricci : it had to be that perfume and no other (like yesterday, for some unfathomable reason). I needed to be wearing it. And I didn’t quite know why. It just felt necessary. Protective. The fundamental benevolence of this scent: ethereal musks that transcribe your person with those soft tendrils of flower ; the pure savon of its elevated, swan-like soapery…….. …. I don’t know if the Botticellian fragrance surrounding me that night seemed odd at all to the night staff attending to me at Ofuna Central Hospital, as I crashed to the floor clutching my side, screaming, but there is such a deep tenderness to this scent that it kept me serenely anchored in the elsewhere the whole time in some kind of eternal primavera. I felt the same yesterday: a timelessness (but this time, more anchored within myself ); and yet again, when I woke up this morning; the perfume still lingering gently, but resiliently, on all my clothes.
Places where I can score vintage perfume in Japan these days are rapidly dwindling. You never know if an old ‘recycle shop’ or antique shop will have closed down or even vanished into thin air. Last week we went in search of a place we had discovered a while back near Shibuya where I found a small bottle of the exquisite Dior Dior and other treasures and was up for more………; there was no longer anyone on the premises. The legendary Shinagawa Flea Market, where many of my early breathless and heartstopping bargains were documented regularly here on The Black Narcissus, permanently closed its doors during the coronavirus pandemic. Several of the places I would regularly frequent in Yokohama have also shuttered. Vintage emporia that once stocked sometimes hefty amounts of perfume – boxed extraits behind the glass of cabinets obstructed by leather bags and jewellery, wigs – the joy of carefully moving something out of the way to reveal a softly sleeping parfum that has been unwanted by anyone but me for many decades a very peculiar and particular thrill – now put their focus on other things; clothes, objets, knicknacks; fabrics.
Sometimes occasional places still do yield though. Last week on a sudden whim we went up to the Salvation Army store in Tokyo, a place we hadn’t been in years, and fortunately just in time: the website had said it was open until 1:30pm, but these were apparently pre-Covid times – the sprawling building, hidden in a residential district near Shinjuku famous for its Buddhist Shingon sect was actually closing at 12 and we had just got there at 11:42 (a good job we had foresworn showers in the morning and just jumped out of bed and gone up there, otherwise we would have missed it and had a totally wasted journey). Splitting up upon entry, D ransacked the clothes rails with hawk-eyed precision and picked a great range of very cool clothing within ten minutes : I myself of course went straight for the cosmetics and perfumes section- with its unbelievable finds in the past, if you want to see my old article on this lovely place I was brimming with expectation- even if on this particular occasion there was not much left there except a Mitsouko edp and a Bal A Versailles eau de cologne for thirty dollars – both in bottles I have never had before and thus had to buy. Even if for me these two are not at the holy grail levels of mouth-drying excitement (said the spoiled Little Lord Fauntleroy: pardonnez moi, mesdames), I was still very pleased to get them, and I do like how they look placed on top of my recently acquired rare 1974 vintage chypre, Lois Azzaro Couture parfum.
Speaking of classic chypres, which Mitsouko, along with the original Coty Chypre – which I don’t know well enough to comment on as I have never smelled the vintage creation, even if I know there is a beautiful bottle probably still waiting for me in Tokyo in an old British antique shop – just look at it! – is the prototypical example, the other day before work, in order just to give me a pep in my bloodstream, I cruised into my secret shop in the Shonan area to see if I could pick up a thing or two cheaply for a quick perfumista thrill. In there right now, stacked up neatly on the shelves, there are a lot of things that you or I would probably want, including old Guerlains – D got me the 30ml parfum of L’Heure Bleue for my birthday from there- it was expensive but it has always been a dream of mine to own it; not quite sure why I haven’t written about it yet but I will at some point, probably in spring – somehow it doesn’t feel right in the cold, and I want to use it in tandem with the vintage L’Heure Bleue soap I had bought from the same place in grand anticipation of properly wearing the regal plumage of the pure perfume itself.
Yes, there are certainly things on those shelves that I want, and may have to get soon (because I have a slight fear in my bones that it will just suddenly close down, that I will turn up one day and it will all be gone and I will have missed my chances; there are rarely many people in there and I don’t quite see how the shop can survive). There is a 28ml Nº19 extrait in the Chanel cabinet, for example, at the steal price of ¥5800 ($39, £31): a ton of Vol De Nuit and Mitsouko, as always, and some lovely Jardins De Bagatelle; a Parfum D’Hermès extrait I will need because I am totally obsessed with that one at the moment – I now prefer it to Chamade, with that dirty animalic powdered base packed with incense and balsams and the rose/hyacinth top – it has become my private night perfume – and there is a boxed vaporisateur haphazardly slung into a flotsam reduction bin for just $21.
What I came away with on Wednesday though were just perfumes from loose change; I didn’t feel like splurging. Sometimes there is something quite skinflint thrilling about the challenge of spending as little as possible but still walking away with a throbbing little bottle of perfume in your pocket : in the rummageable bargain bin beneath the shelves, I picked up a pristine boxed parfum of a scent I had never even heard of before, Envol by Ted Lapidus (1981), a much adored sporty green floral chypre from back in the day as I found out when looking it up on Fragrantica, and one that now goes for very high prices, from $500-$700 (the 15ml extrait from that shop was $8). Very much of its time, in some ways this perfume of a certain hushed young maturity puts me in mind of the first Armani Pour Femme, a ruched blouse heartflutterer from 1982 which is admittedly more ambery, and with a more herbally delicate rose – (Envol is more androgynous and could be her more athletic older sister). In any case, that was a real find. Anyone who knows Envol, please do let me know what you think of it.
Next, my crooked claws delved in and hoisted a familiar delight: the beautiful (to me, anyway), 40’s green and white stripes of Carven’s classic Ma Griffe, MY FIRST TIME EVER FINDING THE PARFUM! I have had a couple of mini miniatures in the past, the flacons so small it is sometimes difficult to even get the perfume out of the bottle mouth, as parts of those old red velvet indented Souvenirs From Paris boxed collections that sometimes turn up at fleamarkets, but never before a full bottle of actual extrait. There is an unparalleled freshness to Ma Griffe, as sunny and bright as a new head of lettuce in a happy vernal paradise garden; citric and zinging in a way I don’t think I have never discovered elsewhere (famously, the perfumer, Jean Carles, instructed by Madame Carven to create something outdoorsy and upbeat, ‘without all the heaviness’, was said to be virtually anosmic when creating this perfume, making it up with his memory smell brain and the help of his vowed-to-silence assistant, but not actually smelling it – perhaps this could account for the perfume’s bracingness – some might even say brashness. Ma Griffe certainly has its detractors – and after all the name does mean ‘My Claws’ (or ‘my signature’, whichever you prefer) but I personally love the rush of its careless vivacity.
To me, this is possibly the best chypre of all time (But let’s rage and debate if you hate this idea). The top notes – green, floral, citrus, an upward flight of hissingly crisp leafed aldehydes – are a delight of fresh air and optimism. The base is smooth and assuaging. The edt I have, though, a lot of it now used, is one of those perfumes that I unfortunately must optimize when alone – D doesn’t like it on me really: I think it is one wide brimmed polka-dotted-lady-hat day at the races too far for him ; the softer, warmer, delicious parfum, however, drying down on me more acceptably to the most classic, powdery Chypre with a capital C accord on my skin for many hours that is far more sensual. I will treasure this. And, a potent 15ml flacon in perfect nick, it only cost me £4.25.
CHYPRE, CHYPRE – BUT WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF A CHYPRE?
I distinctly remember, as a twelve or thirteen year old, waiting in line for Latin class to start – yes, I was one of the weirdos that chose Latin – and my tall, gangly and brainy friend Sally Derby coming up to me from down the corridor smelling amazing. But disturbing. I of course immediately asked what is was, perturbed by the bright, soft, but rather dark aura that enveloped her; one that wrapped her schoolgirl self up in a thick blanketed air of adult mystery. “It’s The Body Shop Chypre oil” she said (and being by far the best at French in the school, I know she definitely pronounced it right). That moment was such a memorable entry into the phenomenon of chypres that I think even now that particular scent – now prized by aficionados who wore it back in the day and much searched for on eBay for astronomical prices – is still the ur-chypre template in my mind. To me, the classic, classical chypre scent is always a powdery and silvery enigma with dark traces – the requisite oakmoss (real, please) and labdanum, with musks and patchouli/vetiver shot through with an upper field bergamot and floral brightness part of the inherent internal paradox. There is always an arch, arms-length aggression with a chypre, but then an interior, furred and textural softness. A yielding; an admission. In this regard, the most consecrated archetypes for me would probably be Mitsouko and Chanel Pour Monsieur, which I have always adored since I first started wearing it as a then-slender stripling of an adolescent – the vintage après rasage format still one of my all time favourites (the edt has slightly too much citronella and cardamom), but both of these, Mitsouko’s irascible spice and grouchful piercingness notwithstanding, dry down to the classical mossy base accord that always wears its bona fide chypre accreditations on its lapel with pride and panache.
I am not going to argue with perfumers and archivists such as Michael Edwards who put chypres in different families: green chypres, citrus chypres, floral chypres, leather chypres, ‘oriental’ chypres etc – at a certain point, virtually any perfume with a mossy, woody or leather/patchouli base that has contrasting floral/citrus top notes gets put in the chypre category: Miller Harris Citron Citron, CK One apparently make the grade with their chypric undertones, as does Dior Diorella, which I love, but didn’t quite make the list below even though I like it personally better than Miss Dior, which has always scared me a bit (and why it is so brilliant). Citruses form the main theme of such perfumes – my choice for really sharp citric chypre (or is it an aromatic? You tell me….probably Quiquopro de Grès), but what these perfumes do all have in common is that they then move onto darker, alluring final territories. Funnily, two of my holy grails, Vol De Nuit – vanillic, ultimately – and Nº19, elegantly strident, green and iris-ridden – I have never consciously considered chypres (I know, just strike me down if you will, I am no longer deserving), but they actually are, according to most people in the know – as is Calèche – which I would have probably called a floral aldehyde. But then Calèche is no Chanel Nº5, which is completely unfettered with chypric taint; like Rive Gauche, and my beloved Calandre, there is no ignoring the presence of all that moss underneath, and it is that mossiness, even in patchouli whip- wielding leather vixens like Paloma Picasso, that ultimately seals the deal.
I had a nice surprise on Thursday night, after a miserable ice cold grey day back at work when I had been feeling significantly under par : a package from my brother had arrived from London.
Contained within was a luxurious perfume tome on perfume bottle design by Marc Rosen, creator, among many other ingenious inventions, of the classic fan-shaped flacon for Lagerfeld’s eponymous cloved-orange, spice floral amber KL from 1983 – one of the most prized bouteilles in my collection.
In direct lineage with its 70’s older spiced feather boa counterparts like Opium, Guy Laroche J’ai Ose, and Dioressence (but especially Opium), KL was part of an 80’s New Wave of perfumes that extended that theme for a while – Coco, Ungaro Diva, Krizia Teatro Alla Scala and L’Arte di Gucci – all fabulously ‘event’ perfumes meant for the full garb and face – manicured up to the max and coiffed til the cows come home – until their fashion obsolence became quickly apparent with the arrival of the first Kenzos, Romeo Giglis, the Calvin Kleins and Prescriptives Calyx.
Still, KL has always had its unique evolutionary facets. Less clawed and take-no-prisoners than Opium, a beautifully lilting orange top note fused with rose, ylang, Jamaica pepper, and an emotively gentle vanilla and benzoin balsam base, I first encountered this spicy natural ice breaker on a friend of mine at university – Jo – who wore the perfume with an air of confident introversion and flair. It is fascinating to be able to literally return to the drawing board to hear about the inspirations and technical exigencies of capturing the precise demands of the daunting Mr Lagerfeld; the marriage between a perfumed liquid and the flacon that houses it such a vital part of this medium’s hypnotic pleasures, and durable evanescence.
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!)
-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
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, deliciouslyfrothy, 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.
