“Death by Perfume”

At the end of the tenth century, a period in which Japan’s most refined literature flourished, outstanding women’s voices were heard in extraordinary stories, profound novels, immortal poetry, and erotica. This story was written in the Court of Heian by Lady Onogoro:

Once there was a faithless courtier who deceived his mistress with three different women in one night. One of the women, being the lady’s maidservant, tearfully confessed to her, and the lady, who had quite enough of her lover’s nonsense, conceived a plot to dispose of him.

On the courtier’s next visit she affected a sweet and trusting demeanor, and begged him to accompany her to the perfume-mixing chamber, on the pretext of concocting a new scent which would be theirs alone. The courtier, who fancied himself a connoisseur of the perfumer’s art, eagerly followed his mistress to the marble chamber where mixing vats steamed, and angelica leaves hung drying in long strings, and evening-primrose petals yielded their oils to the pressure of great iron mangles.

Never had the courtier smelled such a confluence of scents, and his nostrils thrilled to the harmony of peaflower and violet, of honeysuckle and lemon balm and wild hyacinth. Passing the grinding slab he pinched powder of nutmeg and cloves between his finger and thumb, and crushed the white crystal which comes from the bark of the camphor tree, quoting, as he did so, snippets of poems he thought relevant, for snippets, it must be said, were all he could remember.

Hiding her scorn at such self-satisfaction, the lady embraced her lover passionately and promised him an entirely novel sensation. Intrigued, the courtier was easily persuaded to remove his garments and lie down on the robe which his mistress had spread on the floor.

The lady began with dabs of iris and cloves on her lover’s temples and proceeded to the soft hollow at the base of the throat, which received the potent essence of marigold. Under each armpit she dabbed yarrow and gentian, and continued with her tender ministrations until she had distributed the scents across the lover’s entire enraptured body.

But what the lady knew was that, just as an excess of yin transforms itself into the opposite yang principle, so, in certain dosages, the otherwise healing and stimulating flower essences can be induced to take on a negative aspect.

Once again she plied her vials above the courtier’s body, and the mustard plunged her lover into that deep gloom which has no origin, and the mimulus filled him with the fear of illness and its consequences, and the larch convinced him of failure, and the holly pricked his heart with envious vexation, and the honeysuckle brought tears of homesickness to his eyes.

The heather, added in a certain secret proportion, made mountains out of molehills, and the gorse discouraged him, and the clematis bemused him, and the elm overwhelmed him with inadequacies, and the crab apple convinced him that he was unclean. The chestnut bud caused him to replay compulsively the memory of his many mistakes, and the willow made him begrudge the good fortune of his fellow men, and the aspen made him sweat and tremble with vague apprehensions, and the cherry plum convinced him that his mind would give way, and the wild rose resigned him to apathy, so that he did not care whether he lived or died but would have preferred, on balance, the latter.

Satisfied that she had thus brought him to a point of preparedness, the lady administered two more dabs of crab apple to his temples, to exacerbate the self-hatred. In a swoon of self-disgust her lover begged her to deal him a fatal dose, so that he might pay the price for all his crimes against her. The lady, seeing the courtier powerless in her arms, took pity on his torment and delivered a drop of aconite to his waiting tongue. And so died the faithless lover, all naked and relieved, and not since the death of the Shining Prince himself was there ever a corpse so fragrant at its funeral.

—The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro

Untitled #7 (collage for Blood Wedding), painting by Juan Gonzalez, 1988, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, photograph: Christopher Watson.