Rose Neriko

Neriko is a traditional Japanese incense dating back to the 7th century, when women of aristocracy blended their signature scent to imprint their impressions on men. Back then men and women in court lived completely separated. The Story of Genji mentions incenses and their impression on Hikari Genji numerous times.

I started off by making a more traditional blend of sandalwood, jinko, resins, and kaiko or cuddy shells, cloves and camphor. The neriko was nice enough, but there was nothing special about it. I remembered the pieces of jinko that  Ross Urrere had given me that he had soaked in rose absolutes. They smelled heavenly!

So, I thought to modernize and Westernize the neriko by adding rose. I started by just adding some rose absolute, but then I got this brilliant idea to add rose petals and rose concrete. I pounded the rose petals by hand into powder, then added the wood powders, spices, camphor, etc. After it was moistened, I added the rose absolute and the rose concrete, and pounded the mixture the prescribed 1000 times and then rolled the paste into small balls.

From top left clockwise: kunroku resin, jinko, camphor, rose petals, sandalwood

I love making neriko. It's very tactic and satisfying. It's also kind of mindless once you get over the measuring part. It takes a while to make, but I can watch TV while I do it. And the result is almost always satisfying. (I did make a few stinkers along the way; a necessary evil, I think.)

The rose neriko smells like a fresh, raw, dewy rose to me. It's not the refined, French, perfumy rose. Nerikos are not to be burned, but heated. It lasts for over one hour heated in an aroma pot. It's smokeless, which is a fact I like very much.

Neriko is used in tea ceremonies, too, in the winter. In the summer, jinko and sandalwood are burned. (Or more precisely, heated.) I will write about some traditional neriko I have in the near future.

Rose Neriko can be found on Etsy!

A New Friend

My new friend Yanagi-san on the left; my good friend Akiko on the right

 I've been looking for someone to teach me kodo （香道）or the way of incense, but to no avail. There seems to be a lot of teachers of the way of tea, but not incense. Then, a good friend of mine met someone that teaches about incense that used to work for one of the largest incense makers in Japan. She even managed to arranged for me to meet him! A dream come true!!

I met Kenichi Yanagi on a Friday afternoon. Our conversation began with ousu ("weak" tea) that my friend served on the tatami mat. It was a great ice breaker and a very nice gesture. We listened to three different woods that I had: an old sasora from the Edo period, a kyara from Yamadamatsu, and a sumotara also from Yamadamatsu.

I asked him about how to distinguish the five different tastes, kan (sweet 甘,) san (sour 酸,) shin (hot or spicy 辛,) ku (bitter 苦,) and kan (salty 鹹.) Sweet is fairly easy to distinguish, and I finally think I understand sour and salty. Sasora was sweet with a touch of sour. The scent became a little bitter (I thought) as time passed, but was largely unchanged. Apparently, constancy is one of the things that is required of good quality.

Yanagi-san cut a tiny, tiny piece off and said that it's better to use very small pieces of wood to tell the quality of the wood. I thought this to be very interesting as we dilute essential oils and absolutes when we evaluate them. In fact, I work in dilution when I'm composing as I can tell the nuances better when the oils are highly diluted. Also, we were told that a venerable monk that names woods listens to the wood as he hold the burner on his lap. He says that "if the scent doesn't reach his nose, it's not worthy of being named."

Yanagi-san gives lectures on Japanese incense materials and on incenses mentioned in the Bible. No less than thirty scent materials are mentioned in the Bible, he told us. He goes to botanical gardens around the world to find these plants. He is having a hard time finding a live spikenard plant. If anyone knows where one can see it, please let me know!

Horse Hair and Mosquito's Leg

Fragrant woods, namely agarwood or aloeswood, that are used for kodo in Japan are getting very scarce. The price of kyara and jinko seem to rise yearly. I read somewhere that only ten years ago, top grade kyara could be had for 2500 yen a gram, about 1/8th of what it is today!

Scarcity of wood didn't start recently. When Japan was under feudal rule during the Edo Period, the country was closed to most foreign countries. If I remember correctly, Japan traded only on a limited scale with Holland, Portugal and China. (I might be wrong about Portugal...) Since all fragrant materials including aloeswood had to be brought in from abroad, the supply was very limited. Also it was during the Edo Period that kodo became very popular among the princesses and came to be considered a part of proper upbringing. Since supply of wood was very limited, only a small amount could be burnt at a time. The word that is used to describe the amount of of the precious wood used in kodo is "babi-bunsoku," meaning literally, as thin as horse's hair and small as a mosquito's leg.

This kind of expression and sensitivity to material seems very Japanese to me. Since Japan never had much natural resources of its own, its citizens had to always rely on imports and also be very thrifty about materials. Words like "mottainai" meaning "precious, not wasting, holding off" all at the same time are unknown in English as far as I know. In that sense babi-bunsoku could have only been born in Japan, and kodo is a thoroughly Japanese pass time.

Kyara

This is Ranjatai, the most famous and important piece of kyara in Japan.  The markers show where pieces were taken from it by shoguns and emperors.

I listened to the scent of kyara for the very first time this summer. I'd read about it in Miyao Tomiko's 「伽羅の香り」or "The Scent of Kyara," and had been gifted a small sample of agarwood oil and pieces of jinko from friends, but nothing really prepared me for it.

My mother and I arrived at the venerated incense shop Yamadamatsu just before our appointment at 10:30 on a hot and muggy, typical summer day in Kyoto. We were lead through the store, through a courtyard to a tea room like structure. We entered and was relieved that it was air conditioned. We waited for a few minutes and a young woman with a tray with some incense burners arrived. She gave us a quick and very basic lesson in kodo, and told us that we would be "listening to," not smelling, three different pieces of wood. They might all be the same or different. Two maybe the same or not. The point was to see who gets it right.

She put the tadon (charcoal) into the censer and covered it by making a cone with the ash. She then pressed the ash neatly and brushed the ash on the rim away with a feathered tool. She put her hand on the censer to test the temperature, then she deliberately poked a hole in the top to the tadon, then placed a ginyo (mica plate) on top. Slowly, she scooped up a tiny piece of wood from the elaborate paper wrapping, and placed it on the ginyo.

I felt like a blue wing swooped me into another dimension. The smell was floral and woody, purple and blue with streaks of white. It was like nothing I'd experienced before. In a single word, it was otherworldly.

The young woman passed the censer to my mother to listen to, then my mother passed it to me. I put my right hand on top of the censer covering it, making a reverse C shape with my thumb and fingers where I will be putting my nose, and holding the censer with my left hand in the prescribed manner. Both elbows must be out, creating a triangle with your head as you put the censer to your nose. I inhale once, then turn my head to the side to exhale and contemplate the scent. I inhale again, turn head. Once more, I inhale and turn my head to exhale. To my surprise the scent in my hand is much more demure than the powerful scent that was emitted when the wood was first put on the ginyo. I enjoyed the sweet, jasmine-like floralness of the scent that rested on a foundation of grand woods.

The second wood was lit. This was totally different. No drama. Very shy, soft wood. Almost not there. We listened and passed it around. Then came the third one. My first impression was that it was yet another different wood, but I wanted to smell the first one again so much that I looked for similarities. This one didn't have the voluptuousness of the first and was much more shy and demure, but I manged to find the same sweetness I found in the first one. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I decided to mark it the same as the first.