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that something like that is artificial, when the familiar clearly seems natural.
    How many times have I heard someone say: ‘Your perfumes only have flowers and natural products in them, don’t they, nothing artificial?’ A question to which I invariably reply that I use just as many artificial products as natural ones, and that without artificial products I would not be able to create perfumes.
    It was the chemistry of perfume that allowed the artisans of perfumery, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to become artists by freeing themselves from the constraints of nature.

    Hong Kong, Saturday 6 March 2010
    Disappointment
    I brought in my hand luggage the draft for the women’s perfume with pear as its top note. Being somewhere else is a good way to smell something differently. I vaporize the perfume and smell it. I am disappointed. Is it because of the heat and humidity of Hong Kong, or is my nose playing tricks on me? The smell is rasping, acrid, a distortion of the idea I had in mind. I close the bottle and put it away in my bag. I will smell it again later.

    Tokyo, after the plum trees have blossomed but before the cherry trees have
    Juxtaposition
    Seasonality has a cultural dimension in Japan. It is customary there to begin a letter with a reference to the season, to dress in the season’s colors and to eat according to the cycle of seasons. This evening we have been invited to dine in a restaurant that cooks soba, noodles made with buckwheat flour. We have the restaurant to ourselves. The place is the size of a small lobby. The smell of flour is very noticeable and reminds me of roasted chestnuts. We sit down at a counter made of cypress wood. We are greeted by three cooks in their whites wearing blue bandanas round their foreheads. They are at our service, here to prepare dishes and serve them to us. One of them kneads the dough and leaves it to stand for a while. He then picks it up again and, following a precise ritual, spreads it into a square shape. Then, using a ruler, he cuts away noodles the thickness of a shoelace. Meanwhile, another cook mills grain of buckwheat with a pestle and mortar, making the flour that will be used for the next sitting. The noodles are thrown by the handful into the hot stock kept at the ready and removed almost immediately, shared out between our bowls and served. The meal begins. I am advised to take big slurps. Noodles are eaten noisily in Japan.
    After the first bowl of noodles, there is a succession of many other dishes, each presented in different tableware – in Japantableware changes according to the season: ceramics in winter, glass and bamboo in summer. And each new offering is a surprise to the eye and the palate. Each concoction plays on the juxtaposition of colors, textures and tastes, and on the seasonality of the produce. The freshness of the ingredients is essential, the flavors are subtle. In this sort of cuisine, over-piling the plate, extravagance and sauces are unknown. Mixtures, which are typical of traditional Western cooking, allow for correcting mistakes. Here mistakes are not allowed. The performance played out before us contributes to our pleasure, a temporal hedonistic pleasure, and requires excellence from the cooks.

    Kyoto, Wednesday 10 March 2010
    Courtesy
    We are leaving the
ryokan
this morning; the owners of the inn see us out on to the street and thank us at length, leaning their torsos forward, straight-backed. We set off in the taxi and travel a few meters. I glance back and the owners wave to us once more, keeping a watchful eye on our departure. I hesitate to look away. We lose sight of them when the taxi turns at the end of the street.
    We need to take the Tokaido Shinkansen, the high-speed line that will take us to Kyoto. I am impressed by the size of the station, by its cleanliness and signage, thanks to which a foreigner has no trouble finding his way. When we reach our platform, I am surprised by how calm and disciplined the other