The Scent of a City

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. - Rudyard Kipling

Recently I was invited to a wine tasting in San Francisco where I encountered many rare and old vintages over the course of a long, five-hour dinner. My tolerance for this type of event generally starts running thin around the second hour, and my mind was starting to wander, desperate for escape. Then a wine was poured that woke all of my senses on the first taste. It was something old and French, I no longer remember what. All I know is, that particular bottle of wine smelled exactly like a rainy day in Tokyo.

It was beguiling and baffling, how so many memories were stirred by that one whiff of fermented grape juice. I continued swirling and sniffing and sipping with eyes closed, nose jammed halfway in my glass, feeling as if a magic vintner had found a way to bottle the essence of Tokyo itself. In an instant I was transported - as if I'd dropped into a space/time warp. I was younger, and I smelled the wet pavement, felt my feet walking on its slick surface, breathed the musty moist air. Then all my senses kicked in as I heard the noise of traffic, the whoosh of tires on slick asphalt, voices chattering in Japanese, felt droplets of warm summer rain cling to my skin, the sea of umbrellas bobbing before me, the anticipation of the night ahead, and detected the hint of food being grilled, fried, broiled wafting from back streets, mingled with cigarettes, exhaust and the verdant cologne of someone I once knew.

These are smells embedded in my being from many years ago, and inseparable from the soul of the city itself and from my experience of it. This part of my experience of Tokyo - its scent - has been so impactful that the first sentence of my novel starts out talking about it.

I kept swirling and sipping that wine, oblivious to the twenty others gathered around the big table. Then I noticed nobody else was drinking the wine because to most of the others at that party, the wine was simply corked, over the hill and barely drinkable. So that's what Tokyo smells like, at least to me: corked French wine. A mix of fruit and decay, old and new, asphalt and greenery, bitter and sweet. I savored every sip of it, pitying the others for not having access to the same space/time machine in their own glasses.