Perfumes and books: the story of scents through novels

How do you describe a perfume to someone who doesn't have the chance to smell it?

There are many paths one can take. One of the ways I love to travel is by intertwining perfumery with literature. The atmosphere of a novel can sometimes be more immediate than a list of olfactory notes. And a perfume, too, is a story, an evolution.

I have chosen five Jijide fragrances that I love very much, recounting them through the lens of as many novels with which they build an ideal, passionate dialogue.

TERRA - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

One of the things I love most about perfumery is the journey. The ability of certain fragrances to transport you to places in the world that you have never visited and that, perhaps, you will never happen to visit.

Terra, in this sense, is a one-way ticket with immense evocative power.
We are in Kenya, under a sky overflowing with red, at sunset. People's shadows stretch across the dark, parched earth. The scorching air giving way to the first cool of the evening.

It is a narcotic explosion of spices, played beautifully in contrasts between hot and cold. You can almost feel it—the scorched sand carried by the breeze—in the play of woods and leather in the base.

Yes, you smell this perfume and you are there. In the expanse of a millennial wasteland, rich in legends, balanced between fire and mystery.
If it were a record, it would be “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” by Brian Eno and David Byrne: esoteric tribal beats, folk, ethnic, and funk nuances. Plenty of rhythm, just as much spirituality.
If it were a book, inevitably, it would be the novel that inspired that album: “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” by Amos Tutuola.
A masterpiece of Nigerian literature, published in the early 1950s, the volume is a collection of fables halfway between dream and reality. A child with curious eyes fixed on the world, attracted and at the same time frightened by the fantastic creatures and mysteries he will have to face on his very personal journey of growth. Terra, too, is a perfume that seems to live there on the border, between the effectively earthly and the magical.

RISO - Brothers by Yu Hua

Although it is a very welcome aspect for many perfume enthusiasts, personally I tend not to look for fragrances that clearly recall food. I tend not to wear, and to flee from, what generally falls under the term “gourmand”.
Every rule has its exceptions, however. The smell of freshly cooked rice, on the other hand, fascinates me a lot. The nostrils filling with steam. The domestic intimacy, subtly melancholic, that a bowl of white rice evokes.

It is a scent that I really like because I find it twofold: on one hand, enclosed within the four walls of the home; on the other, far away, evoking the welcome small bowls of rice served as a side dish during my travels in Asia.

Riso by Jijide is, in this sense, sharp: familiar on one side, exotic on the other. The white rice, freshly cooked, is dressed in soft citrus and spicy contrasts.
We are on a chaotic street in Shanghai, crowded with street food stalls. This is the inspiration behind the fragrance, and you can sense it: from the grains, to an elegant sweetness, as if the course had changed and we found ourselves tasting an Asian dessert.

It is an intimate, contemplative perfume… domestic, precisely. But it is on a journey at the same time.

If it were a book, it would perhaps be “Brothers” by Yu Hua: a roaring black comedy set in China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. The indissoluble bond of two brothers that is revealed in the madness of an increasingly grotesque outside world. You laugh a lot reading “Brothers”, at times you feel at home. Other times, something more visceral, perhaps even dark, sets in. It is first and foremost a deeply dense, human story.

Human like a meal shared, sheltered from the chaos of the world, with the gaze turned elsewhere, towards Asia and its silences of rice.

OLTRE - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

It is not easy, after years of passion for perfume, to remain surprised by a fragrance. It is difficult to come across a perfume that knows how to surprise by declining a raw material we love in a new way.
As a lover of violet and its cosmetic nuances, I was surprised by Oltre. A violet both nostalgic and metallic; airy and material to the point that my nose perceives it as glass-like.

It is a glass flower; perhaps a knick-knack on the shelf of a grandmother we loved so much and whom we said goodbye to for the last time too long ago.

A physical distance that flows into memory, into those teachings that affection left us.

It is an apparently sad journey, yet rich in courage, that the protagonist of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong seems to face: a stranger in a strange land, without a compass. Giving him strength is the voice of a mother who, to express her love, sings him the song "Happy Birthday to You" and the generations of women who raised him.

Oltre, like the memory that does not fade entirely.

LIAN YEN - Nagori by Ryoko Sekiguchi

In Japan, there is a splendid, untranslatable word: “Nagori”. It indicates the subtle nostalgia one feels when a season is about to end, giving way to the next.
It is a feeling that can develop in those last days of summer when one resigns oneself to the inexorable cycle of nature. The essayist Ryoko Sekiguchi has explored the nuances of nagori in relation to food, highlighting how this nostalgia is accompanied by the trust in the return of a season, in a spirit of almost moving aesthetic contemplation.

For me, Lian Yen is potentially a nagori perfume. A fragrance to celebrate a moment of vivid security even in a situation of transition and doubt. It is a velvety and comforting perfume; caressing in the delicious peach nuances and invigorating in the sparkling green mandarin and pink grapefruit. Summer is coming to an end. Lian Yen is a suspended, watercolored sunset. Autumn will come.
It is not a goodbye, but a see-you-soon.

JIN U - Pond by Claire Louise Bennett

A beam of green light. This is what you visualize when smelling “Jin U” for the first time: an aromatic and luminous perfume, composed on tiptoe as if it were a comforting Zen watercolor.

It is graceful, comforting, but communicates strength. The ability to be resolute immersed in calm, without yielding to the passing of time.

It is a perfume that plays with contrasts, between woody shadows and luminous citrus, which personally also communicates a strong peace to me.

That sensation I felt while reading the very particular novel “Pond” by the writer Claire Louise Bennett: a stream of thoughts of a woman who has decided to live in a small chalet immersed in nature. A protagonist who, in the incessant passing of time, has been able to refine her spirit of observation. Alone, distant, she is able to welcome the wonder of the nature that surrounds her.
And precisely for this reason, she is never bored.

A perpetual strength. In feeling, in imagination.

Jin U is that strength that observes and welcomes, silent but inexhaustible.