Scents and sensibility

November 27, 2024 7:15 AM

The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Kō “ There has never been a group of people in any time or place who were so keen to display their sophistication and refinement. It wouldn’t do to merely put out a few sticks of incense - no, you would have to prove that your taste was more exquisite, your judgement more refined, your etiquette more oblique. You could of course merely invite some other nobles over for an incense appreciation party, make a few cutting but plausibly deniable remarks about a rival, maybe drop a few lines of poetry linking the incense to the current season. But if you were really on the ball you’d be looking for a way to simultaneously humiliate your rivals, flirt with your love interest, and impress people in a position of power. They didn’t just perfect cultured refinement - they weaponized it. Only under such conditions could something like Genji-kō (源氏香) arise. It is a parlor game played with incense” [via]
posted by dhruva (14 comments total)

Oh, this is lovely.
posted by zamboni at 7:42 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

52 is a great number. Number of weeks in a year, number of cards in a deck (excluding jokers), twice the number of letters in the English alphabet. These correspondences provide the bones of many excellent puzzles... The two correspondences here (partitions of five and almost all of the chapters of the take off genji) are good wood for the pile. And the characters are beautiful.

So... Why no natural correspondence between genji-mon and weeks of the year? Probably because the lunar calendar (which naturally has 28 day months, divisible into 7 day weeks) doesn't naturally fit into the solar calendar... Interesting to reflect that years, solstices, and equinoxes may have been in an entirely different conceptual realm than weeks and months, such that it's kind of nonsense to say that there's 52 weeks in a year in the first place.

Alternatively, the sequence of the chapters of genji also give a natural correspondence to weeks of the year, so long as there's an accepted new year. (Which generally there is.)
posted by kaibutsu at 7:43 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

Huh. So it's a big week for combinatorics in my feeds, and that's always good.
posted by The Bellman at 7:50 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

I’ve mentioned before how incredibly refined and sophisticated Japanese tastes were at a time when the equivalent classes in Europe had to be reminded by etiquette books not to “blast from thy hinder parts as from a gun.” Of course that says nothing about actual life and society, and it’s no basis for judgment, but it never fails to amaze when I think about it.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:57 AM on November 27

The author drops a Knuth reference near the middle of the piece, in case you were wanting to know what that was, it's on page 17 here.
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:01 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

The author drops a Knuth reference

"Zeroth printing (revision 7), 28 October 2005"

Knuth is committed to the bit.
posted by mhoye at 10:07 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

I’ve mentioned before how incredibly refined and sophisticated Japanese tastes were at a time when the equivalent classes in Europe had to be reminded by etiquette books not to “blast from thy hinder parts as from a gun.” Of course that says nothing about actual life and society, and it’s no basis for judgment, but it never fails to amaze when I think about it.

I'd imagine that Japanese commoners farted a lot.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:08 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]

And just as a follow-up: those etiquette books (at least in English) were directed almost exclusively at the newly wealthy classes of merchants and the emerging bourgeois and such who wanted to ape the manners and appearance of their aristocratic betters, although I'm sure Henry VIII and James VI/I both liked to cut rancid butt-blasts, just because they could. Charles I or Elizabeth I, probably not so much.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:10 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]

true, but who had the better swords.
posted by clavdivs at 1:35 PM on November 27

i've loved this ever since Ezra Pound dropped a passing reference in it in one of his essays
posted by graywyvern at 2:23 PM on November 27

Sometimes when I read the definitions of whole numbers (i.e. 52) I become overwhelmed by the terror-awe prospect we've thrown together this system of circular logic that could all come falling in on us. What would the universe do then?

Genji-kō: absolutely beautiful.
posted by rubatan at 8:26 PM on November 27 [1 favorite]

So... Why no natural correspondence between genji-mon and weeks of the year? Probably because the lunar calendar (which naturally has 28 day months, divisible into 7 day weeks)

Cultured Japanese had 24 sekki/ solar terms to divide the year, and if you wanted even more precision, 72 kō/ pentads.
posted by sukeban at 12:34 AM on November 28 [2 favorites]

I don’t know, I would certainly give the nod for high civilization to the Heian court over any of the equivalent European court cultures of the time, but by the time of the Edo period (the time of James VI & I) I’d say the answer is far less obvious.

In Genji itself, it’s an incense-blending contest to attain the noblest fragrance. Hilariously, the next generation down, the kids are known as the Perfumed Prince and the Fragrant Captain and are always competing to out-scent the other.

This also makes me think of the contest that ends in murder in Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks.
posted by praemunire at 10:14 AM on November 30 [3 favorites]

Another reason that Heian noble society could be so refined is that it was incredibly small and contained. It consisted of roughly 1000 people, all living in the same city, all (sort of) working in the Imperial government. A lot of the elaboration (maybe over elaboration) of cultural elements was this small dense knot of interrelated people all trying to out-do each other.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:25 AM on December 1