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MAY 2013
MICHELLE LEGRO
A TRIP TOJAPAN INSIXTEEN
MINUTES
IN 1902, SADAKICHI
HARTMANN ATTEMPTED TO
TRANSPORT A THEATER
FULL OF PEOPLE ACROSS A
VAST OCEAN USING ONLY
PERFUME AND AN
ELECTRIC FAN
DISCUSSED: Two Expatriate Poets, SoilOpen to Foreigners, The Adam and Eve of
Japonisme, A Common Language,Meditative Loafing, Fairyland, The ProustEffect, Poor Chrysanthemum, A Devil Out
on a Furlough
Ezra Poundthe ex atriate oet
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unhinged fascist, and obstinate
dreamerwas in the productive phase
of a mental breakdown at the time of
his 1945 arrest for treason and his
subsequent detention at an Americaninternment camp just north of Pisa,
Italy. While confined in a cage for
much of the daysix feet square, the
grass hot and matted from his fretful
pacingit was after a transfer to an
officers tent (following a psychiatric
evaluation) that Pound began to write
the Pisan chapter of his Cantos, an epic
poem of bohemian life and loss, of
political misadventures and Odyssean
searching. The canto included a vast
catalog of the people hed known and
admired in his youth in New York City,
artists like himself who had lost the
better part of their minds to war, but
who had somehow survived to see their
art die before them. He called these
men the lost legion, and its patron
saint was a writer hed lost touch with
years before. He wrote in Canto 80:
as for the vagaries of our friendMr. Hartmann,
Sadakichi a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have
enriched
the life of Manhattan
or any other town or metropolis
the texts of his early stuff are
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with the loss of the fly-by night
periodicals
Pound was obsessive about his great
work, discarding draft after draft. In
the same canto that contained the
remembrance of Sadakichi, Pound
would make the admission that haunts
all artists: Beauty is difficult.
Around the same time as Pounds
imprisonment, housed in his own
unofficial interment on the Morongo
Indian reservation in Banning,
California, critic and poet Sadakichi
Hartmann waited out the last years of
the Second World War deeplyimpoverished and depressed. His small
shingled house was located at the dusty
halfway point between Los Angeles and
Palm Springs, where movie stars would
motor past on the freeway for a quick
weekend under an umbrella, returning
to the set smelling of chlorine.Sadakichi was sixty, and it was hard to
imagine the handsome young man he
had once been, the critical darling of
Greenwich Village, the fellow Ezra
Pound delighted in when theyd begun
their correspondence in the early part
of the century. Now in his twilight
years, alcoholic and sickly, Sadakichi
-
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,
from his friends in New York, then Los
Angeles. He had run hard aground
with nearly everyone he had ever met.
His drinking partner, the actor John
Barrymore, had called him a livingfreak sired by Mephistopheles out of
Madame Butterfly.
At the far edge of his adopted country,
Sadakichi had been within an oceans
reach of the completed circle of his life,
the twinkling lights of Japan, his
birthplace, seemingly visible just
beyond the Pacific Coast Highway. He
had tried to make the leap back home
just once, more than forty years before,
in one of the most fateful and
humiliating performances of his life.
For years, he had in his mind a scent
no, less than that, an idea of a scenta
gentle puff, released into the cool night
air. It would melt continents, allowing
him to cross vast oceans like a fast
skull across a glassy lake. He called this
scent his perfume concert, the most
purely aesthetic experience of his self-
proclaimed aesthetic life. And it woulddeliver him home.
If beauty was difficult, then by god
Sadakichi Hartmann would make his
entire life beautifulhe would wallow
in its difficulty.
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Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, son of Oscar
Hartmann of Hamburg and Osada
Hartmann of Nagasaki, was born
around 1869* on the small island of
Dejima, the only slice of soil in
Nagasaki where foreigners were
welcome. Before the Meiji Restoration,
Japan was still, for the most part,
closed to the West and to Westerners.
Women of the merchant class were
allowed to work on the island, some
taking positions with foreign officials,
first as servants and often later as
mistresses. One of these women was
Osada, Sadakichis mother, who
married Oscar Hartmann, a German
official, and quickly had two sons.
His young mother died when Sadakichiwas less than a year old, and the boy
became obsessed with the vision of this
unknown woman. He would tell
fantastical tales about her, claiming
she had been refused burial in
Nagasaki because of her foreign
marriage, and that her body wascarried over six hundred miles to Kobe
to be cremated. This was probably not
true. In 1868, cremation was not
common in Japan, and the
transportation of a body over such a
distance would have been almost
impossible. Osada was probably buried
where she died.
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With his wife gone, there was little to
keep Oscar Hartmann in Nagasaki, and
he decided that he would raise his two
sons in Germany. At the age of four,
Sadakichi would leave Japan, never to
return.
The year Madame Butterfly was
published as a short story in Century
Magazine, Sadakichi was thirty years
old, having lived in America longer
than he had lived in any other country.
The story itself was derived from aFrench novel,Madame Chrysanthme,
by Pierre Loti, which was itself based
on events that may or may not have
happened among the naval officers of
Nagasaki. The Puccini opera wouldnt
have its New York premiere until 1906,
and by then the storys main characterswere almost mythical, the Adam and
Eve of Japonisme.
In the story, Lieutenant Benjamin
Franklin Pinkerton, his name a hard
edge cleaved to a gentle color, has
decided that for his tour in Japan, he
will go native and take a Japanese wife
before settling down with an American
woman. Is the bride very pretty? a
friend asks Pinkerton in the English
translation of Puccinis libretto. Fair
as a garland / of fragrant flowers, he
replies. Brighter than a star in the
heavens. / And for nothing: one
hundred / yen. Pinkertons Japanese
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wife is but the shadow of substance:
she is a perfume, she is the gust of a
butterfly wing. His marriage to her will
be temporary. His real wife will be
flesh and blood, she will be American,
and it is with her that his life will
begin. About this clever plan he
declares: Fate cannot crush him. / He
tries again undaunted. / No one and
nothing breaks his plucky spirit.
Sadakichi would often refer to himself
as the son of Madame Butterfly, aninnocent haunted by a tragedy he could
not set right. (It was a comparison
John Barrymore had clearly tired of
when the actor called Sadakichi a
living freak.) But if there was anyone
in this story Sadakichi resembled in his
turbulent life, it was the devilish,practical Pinkerton, smelling of
whiskey, intoxicated by his Japanese
ghost. He enters upon our stage with
the declaration that the love of the
world is for the taking; he raises a glass
to his American future.
Sadakichi Hartmann arrived in
America in 1882, at the age of twelve,
disowned by his father in Hamburg
and shipped off to live with a great-
uncle in Philadelphia. The young man
had only lived for one year or less in
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his native country. He spoke with a
strong accent, later described by a
newspaper as half German, the other
half not altogether definable. He was
thoroughly German in all that he did,
sarcastic and serious, forever hunched
under a small rain cloud. And yet he
was hailed by friends and strangers as
coming directly from the Orient. Self-
taught and curious, he made his first
contact with what would become an
influential circle of acquaintances by
knocking unannounced on the door of
the poet who lived across the river in
Camden, New Jersey: I would like to
see Walt Whitman.
The poetwith his long gray beard and
open, flowing shirt, which revealed his
naked chestgreeted him by sight.Thats my name. And you are a
Japanese boy, are you not?
If literature was the passport into this
new kind of modern society, Walt
Whitman was the common language,
and the home of Whitman is where,
around the age of sixteen, this lanky,
German Japanese boy with a dark suit
and a pince-nez began his American
pilgrimage into the dark heart of
bohemia.
Whitman fried an egg for the young
man, and over breakfast they spoke ofacting, of the theater, of Shakespeare
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Sadakichi declared himself too tall to
play any of his foolsof what it means
to be American, of Japan and the
beautiful bay of Nagasaki, though I did
not know much about it from personal
recollection. Whitman agreed it must
be beautiful. He sent the boy home
with a proof of one of his poems and
told him to come back soon. Hurrying
to the Camden ferry, the words
Sadakichi held in his hand were these:
After all, not to create only, orfound only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar,
what is already founded,
To give it our own identity,
average, limitless, free;
To fill the gross, the torpid bulk
with vital religious fire;
Not to repel or destroy, so much as
accept, fuse, rehabilitate;
To obey, as well as commandto
follow, more than to lead;
These also are the lessons of our
New World;
While how little the New, after
allhow much the Old, Old World!
A new kind of intellectualimmigration had begun to fill the low-
rent apartments, all-night cafs, and
empty storefronts of turn-of-the-
century New York, one that shared as
much with the newly arrived Russian
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Jews, Germans, and Irish of the
tenements as it did with bored
housewives from Portland, Maine, and
college graduates from Davenport,
Iowa. Unlike the sharp fold in the
corner of a calling card on Fifth
Avenue, there was a special form of
introduction into New Yorks
bohemian life: a book tucked under the
arm, a poem copied for a friend.
Shared enthusiasm for Tolstoy might
make a new Russian acquaintance at a
meeting for the Industrial Workers of
the World, or a few lines of Shelley
could soften the heart of a hardheaded
anarchist.
But it was a common love of the man
who contained multitudes, the proto-
bohemian Walt Whitman, that seemedto be the hothouse that contained all of
these blooming personalities. By
seeking out Whitman first, above all
others, Sadakichi shrewdly positioned
himself as both a reader and someone
to be read about. He felt he belonged in
the pantheon of Whitmans faces fromLeaves of Grass (The pure,
extravagant, yearning, questioning
artists face). It was a privileged realm
of characters that Sadakichi cast on
and off like a parade of masks
throughout his life, even to the very
end (The ugly face of some beautiful
Soul, the handsome detested or
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.
At their first meeting, Whitman
addressed Sadakichi Hartmann as the
Japanese boy, but once the poet began
to get to know him, he recognized that
the young man was simply
unclassifiable. You say Sadakichi
represents the Orient, he reportedly
said. He represents a good deal more
than that.
Work, or rather, employment, was not
something that much interested
Sadakichi Hartmann. After traveling to
Paris and meeting symbolist poet
Stphane Mallarm (and getting fired
from a magazine job), Sadakichi, attwenty-three, published Christ: A
Dramatic Poem in Three Acts,
described byPublishers Weekly as a
sensual and almost blasphemous
drama. The play was immediately
banned, copies were publicly burned
by the New England Society for theSuppression of Vice, and Sadakichi was
arrested, spending his Christmas in
jail. By his mid-twenties hed lost a job
with architect Stanford White after
suggesting his buildings might be
improved upon only by pigeons. He
made a meager living writing two
columns a week for theNew Yorker
- -
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,
newspaper that was the third largest
daily in the city. He wrote about actors,
tramps, and paintersthose on the
artistic and social fringes of New York
life. (Writers somehow always endedup on the top of the social heap.) He
signed his columns with pseudonyms:
Caliban, Hogarth, Chrysanthemum;
the trickster, the satirist, the emblem
of Japan. His writing sometimes
angered his friends, including his
mentor, Whitman, but he also
championed new artists such as
Thomas Eakins and Alfred Stieglitz.
Sadakichi had had a prodigious career
in New York as the poet-king of a small
group of intellectuals in Greenwich
Village. A 1916 article proclaimed him
the weirdest figure of American
lettersHe is Baudelaire, Grard de
Nerval, Verlaine he is a poet, artist,
author, critic, lecturer and professional
esthete. He was a flaneur long after
the age of flaneurs had ended, and
most people didnt quite know what to
make of him. If the writing of the time
was meant to agitate, then Sadakichi
was a soft-hearted bull, more
interested in sniffing flowers than
charging red capes.
In New York, he pursued his friends
obsessively to the point of ruin. He
would burst into their lives and thenflame outa turbulent, unforgettable
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c aracter. He ost rien s as
passionately as he made them, but he
was only following the natural rhythms
of a New Yorks bohemians way of life.
The editor and critic Max Eastman,
writing a review of a novel that
featured a cast of Russian Jews, wrote:
They burn with hot fire Their being
is self-justified. They live and are
sources of life.
Everyone involved in this newly
modern life was searching for a way tolive, a model to live by, a maxim to live
for. Individual energies were envied
among these creatures of self-
amplification, as historian Christine
Stansell described the bohemian in her
bookAmerican Moderns: Bohemian
New York and the Creation of a New
Century. It wasnt enough to make art;
artists had to live a life of constant
inspiration, to themselves and to their
friends, bound together by an endless
circle of reading, writing, and
publishing. The bread and butter of
Greenwich Village life was the word: it
was a vocation, an evocation. Writing
was the transformative medium, the
call to arms for feminists, communists,
and anarchistsall other art forms
were superfluous.
Sadakichi had more in common with
the decadent hero of Joris-KarlHuysmanss 1884 novel,Against
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Nature, about a dilettante who turned
meditative loafing into an art. His hero
dreamed of different ceiling treatments
for his rooms and of embellishing a pet
tortoise with jewels, all within the
suffocating confines of his country
home. Unmoored from family, nation,
creed, and custom, Sadakichi wanted
to live beyond the world of dreary
causes, in a dreamyif a little fussy
corner of his very own. In his criticism,
Sadakichi wrote of beauty, of poetry,
interested in teacups and vases, inactors and their greasepaint, in sweet
smells mixed with sweat.
The essential quality of bohemian life
was dissatisfaction, a paranoia that
everyone else was truly living. Ezra
Pound wrote, If one hadnt beenoneself, it would have been worthwhile
to have been Sadakichi. Like those
who burned with hot fire, the savage
desire for life, and the jealousy among
those who were truly living, led to a
slow self-immolation of one of the eras
brightest minds.
Some of his friends accused Sadakichi
of riding their coattails, others saw him
as intensely curious, outwardly
arrogant, and secretly modest. When
friends and acquaintances spoke of
Sadakichi, they tended to eulogize him.
Sadakichi is indeed a dead author,one friend wrote, only his art is
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entombed while he personally is still
very much aliveat times. For much
of his life, Sadakichi had honed the
curious talent of being lost to history
before he was even dead: one of the
most neglected figures in American
arts and letters. He was accomplished
in everything he did, except in the one
thing that matteredan art that lasted
beyond life. Despite all the young men
who had tried to engage him as their
mentor, Whitman saw something
unique in the nineteen-year-old
Sadakichi: I have more hopes of him,
more faith in him than any of the boys.
They all seem to regard him as a
humbugor if not that, a
sensationalist anyhow, or an
adventurer. I cant see it that way. I
expect good things of himextra goodthings Whitman had shaped
Hartmanns view of the way a true
artist should move through the world:
accepting the hazard of living with an
open heart. Thus the terrible fate for
members of Pounds lost legion: They
just died / They died because they justcouldnt stand it.
In the fall of 1902, when he was around
thirty-five years old, the papers
announced that Mr. Sadakichi
Hartmann, the eccentric art critic,
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would present in a few months time a
short performance entitled A Trip to
Japan in Sixteen Minutes. The piece
was described as a melody in odors.
The turn of the twentieth century saw a
flurry of sense experimentation. The
color organ was patented in 1895, an
instrument with colored panels that lit
up and changed in time to music. A few
years later, one of the first electric
organs, the Telharmonium, would have
its debut in a specially built concerthall in New York. Music had been
mechanized, canned, and zipped along
wiresthere was no reason to believe it
couldnt be aerated as well.
But no one had ever heard of a
perfume concert. It was an invention
so faddish the newspapers had inked
themselves in excitement and still
managed indifference by the second
column. All lovers of good smells are
expected to patronize the concert, one
hopeful feature began. However, It
may be that after a time the olfactory
nerve of the New York gatherings will
become jaded, and will require smells
of more and more pungency. It was
suggested Mr. Hartmann take a trip to
Brooklyns Gowanus Canal.
Sadakichi was not a chemist. He knew
very little about the making of smell,only the impression that it left on his
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dreams. Smell is the most emotional
of all the senses of man, he wrote,
and is able to arouse sentimental as
well as intellectual associations more
swiftly that any other
Over the months of planning,
Sadakichi had been
uncharacteristically quiet about the
performance. He had booked the
theater and told a few friends, who
helped him gauge the forcefulness of
the perfumes he intended to use. Thisleft the public imagination to wonder:
would there be violins stuffed with
roses? Rhythms drummed out with
two brittle sticks of cinnamon? What
would the music smell like, or, rather,
how would the smells sound?
The last evening of November 1902
was miserable and colda blizzard
would cover the city the next day. The
perfume concert was the featured
event on a bill of a casual Sunday pop,
held at the enormous entertainment
complex known as the New York
Theatre, on Broadway between Forty-
fourth and Forty-fifth streets. It was a
remarkable pleasure palace that
contained a music hall, roof garden,
bowling alley, Turkish bath, and two
theaters. The fare that evening was
mostly unremarkable: a ragtime band
followed by a minstrel duo. It was onlythe final act of the evening that
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promised something startlingly new:
A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes,
to be performed by a Mr. Hartmann
with the help of two geishas.
When Sadakichi Hartmann shuffledonto the bare stage of the New York
Theatre with two heavily powdered
women trailing behind, he still had the
long and narrow face of his youth with
an expressive, wide mouth. But there
was something finalized about his
features now, like a retired Kabukiactor still wedded to his makeup.
Visibly Japanese, and clad in an
immaculate shirtfronton which was
pinned his emblem, a huge yellow
chrysanthemumhe appeared shy and
flustered. His two geisha assistants
appeared uneasy as well.
Once the audience quieted down,
Sadakichi cleared his throat and began
in his German-accented, halting
English. He proclaimed that he was
about to take the audience on a journey
of several thousand miles. And, he
declared, the vehicle will be perfume
to lead us into fairyland. Cook never
took out a larger party with less
baggage.
The audience had expected an
instrument that was at once orchestra
and ocean liner. Something big andelectrical and gleaming gold, with bells
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an w st es, t ny tt e sw tc es an a
mahogany seat, in which this man
would sit and fiddle with ivory knobs
until each person smelled his concert
of perfumes and was transported over
land and sea to the lavender fields ofFrance, the shores of the Aegean, and
beyond. But there was no orchestra on
the stage, not even a single instrument,
just two girls in heavy makeup and
kimonos, standing next to a pair of
electric fans and two boxes of perfume-
soaked linen.
The first odor is that of roses given us
as the steamer leaves the wharf.
Sadakichi motioned toward the
geishas, who slid the linen in front of
the fan as if it were a magic-lantern
show. A soft horn tooted from the
orchestra to clarify the steamers
presence. In the space of a minute, the
auditorium filled with the undeniable
smell of roses, which snuffed out the
smoking-car smell that had long
been a feature of that theater, and
killed the scent from the musty
garments of the women sitting in the
upper boxes.
The logic behind Sadakichis
performance was that smell wouldexcite certain memories in the mind,
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muc n e same way e e a
music did. Everyone has experienced
that a smell suddenly appreciated
perhaps of some flower that grew in
the old homestead where we spent our
childhood dayssends back ones trainof thought to scenes of the past more
rapidly and more vividly than any
other art medium. The nose, he
explained, was the least developed of
our sense organs. The eyes have
learned to appreciate a marble
sculpture, the ears to discern a cleversymphony. The nose is a primal beast,
sniffing out food or danger or an
attractive mate. It seems strange that
a sense so easily excited has been left
in a primitive and dormant state, as
our olfactory nerves undoubtedly could
be cultivated to such an extent that anartists manipulation of perfumes
would yield aesthetic pleasures similar
to music or pictorial art.
Neuroscientists have since given a
name to this condition: the Proust
effect. The Frenchmans three-volume-
long bite into a tea-soaked madeleine
set off a number of inquiries into the
link between smell and memory. In the
brain, the olfactory bulb nudges close
to memory-related structures, and
scientists have determined that the
olfactory components of an experience
are often the longest-lastingimpression of an eventsights, sounds,
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and tactile sensations all die a quick
death. The smells most remembered
are those that are particularly vivid,
emotional, or old. It was only natural
that an artist like Sadakichi, who grew
up in the culture of the
Gesamtkuntswerkthe complete
work of artwould want to create and
experience where the elements of art
and life might fuse. A concert of smells,
carefully orchestrated, might be able to
link those forgotten memories so that
one might, in essence, relive a lost
time.
At the time it was considered little
more than a parlor trick that smells
could conjure up a feeling or memory.
Newspapers suggested that the
perfume concert might open an entireindustry of memory aids.
MANUFACTURE OF ANTI-HOMESICK
SCENTS TO FOLLOW DEVELOPMENT OF
NEW YORK FAD, read one headline in
the Chicago Daily; the article
explained that city dwellers traveling
abroad might bring along odorcapsules, so that when faced with
boredom in Paris or Rome they need
only open a package marked
Stockyards Extra-Strength to be
instantly transported home. In 1906, a
movie theater in Pennsylvania hoped
to increase interest in its newsreel of
the Rose Parade by fanning the room
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,
everyone in attendance. A 1960 movie
calledScent of Mystery was the only
film ever to use a failed invention
called Smell-O-Vision, a patented
system of odors cued to the actions on-screen. At Disneylands California
Adventure theme park, opened nearly
a hundred years after Sadakichis
performance, a gentle smell of citrus is
spritzed on visitors during a ride where
they seemingly soar over a grove of
orange trees.
The invention of the perfume concert
was a singular achievement; the
execution of it was something else
entirely. Sadakichi insisted that his
concert would represent an advance in
technology, that the event had
previously never been fully realized
due largely to the lack of an apparatus
capable of driving odors forcibly into
an audience and of producing precise
impressions even at great distances
Such an apparatus has been invented
lately.
The apparatus, an electric fan, was
now blowing over the audience a sickly
strong perfume of roses, which spread
quickly across the orchestra, rising into
the balcony seats. One man shouted
that he did not like the smell of the
scuppers and there were too manyaboard who were seasick. Sadakichi
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in England and were smelling the
native wild rose. Another voice shouted
that the creeping odor reminded him
of the time the gas meter leaked. The
audience had begun to turn.
Now we reach Germany, Sadakichi
continued. The girls slid in a second
square of linen, and after another long
minute the distinct odor of violets was
blown from the stage into the
balconies. Who does not remember
plucking violets on a fair morning
along the banks of the Rhine?
Sadakichi asked. The violet is
Germanys flower. But no one in the
theater remembered plucking violets.
Violets were soaps and cheap toilet
water, saltwater taffy and last nights
whore. Roses were women in fox fur
and fake hair, or husbands begging for
forgiveness. The perfumes that
Sadakichi assumed would carve out the
landscapes of provincial Europe had
little or no effect on his audience. The
nostalgia was his and his alone.
The performance should have lasted
sixteen minutes, but Sadakichi was cut
off at four. The audience stamped,
cheered derisively and began to pour
out of the theater, one reporter wrote.
Poor Chrysanthemum, for so the
inventor styles himself, looked palerthan this shirtfront. He stammered
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some ng or ano er ns an , an
fled. Another newspaper reported that
he bowed, and with his face filled with
very real pain, said in a broken voice
that he would have to be excused; he
could not give the concert under suchconditions. With its large and heavy
features, Sadakichis face was as open
and precise as a clocks. Filled with
pain, it surely resembled, almost
comically so, the gaping mask of
tragedy. Unable to stand it anymore,
he stammered his final words to theaudience: I think I have no more to
say.
He had not meant only to create, or
only to find, but to bring, perhaps from
afar, what he had already found, to give
it his own identity.
When the doors to the theater opened,
the perfumes rushed out into the night
air. The snow began to fall that night,
covering the city in a thick musk of
white. And everything was forgotten
except for the snow; all the shapes of
the city became snow, the taste of theair became snow, nothing was known
that was not soft and quiet and still.
Sadakichi Hartmann returned to the
subject of his perfume concert only
once in a 1 1 essa titled In Perfume
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Land. In it, a gloomier Sadakichi
concluded that the concert could never
have been what he had imagined: an
orchestra of scents that went beyond
mere association to sculpt landscapes
and fairylands. The disconnectedness
of the various waves of pleasurable
feeling make it impossible to carry out
this act to the same pitch of perfection
as music and painting. The perfume
was simply a means to an end. What he
had truly desired that night was a
concert of pure emotion, waves of
pleasurable feeling breaking over the
audience like a great symphonic chord.
He had unknowingly been telling his
audience what to feel and, feeling it so
deeply himself, thought some small
particle of emotion might burst free
and catch hold. As Proust scribbled
away in Paris, Sadakichi grew less and
less sure of his olfactory theory. The
absence of memory is undoubtedly the
cause of the fugitiveness of all olfactory
impressions; it deprives us of the after
flavor, the mental repetition of the
enjoyment we derive from them
By 1916, Sadakichi had spun out the
frayed yarn of his youth in the East. He
had married briefly but prolifically,
siring five children with his wife, and
one out of wedlock in an affair. His
next companion remained hiscommon-law wife, with whom he had
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seven more c ren. e n er on n
Madame Butterfly, he seemed to join
himself with women in the Japanese
fashion Tied for nine-hundred and
ninety-nine years. / Free, though, to
annul the marriage monthly, neverheeding the warning of Sharpless,
Pinkertons friend: Thats an easy-
going gospel / which makes life very
pleasant / but is fatal in the end. And
like Pinkerton, he abandoned nearly all
of them.
Sadakichi headed west, first to found a
theater company in San Francisco,
later to Los Angeles, where he
befriended the well-connected John
Barrymore in much the same way he
had sought out Walt Whitman years
before. In Hollywood he became
known to actors, producers, and
directors as the sad clown of
Barrymores circle. It was hard to
imagine that the middle-aged
Sadakichi Hartmann had ever been
young and matinee-idol handsome,
like the men and women he
entertained in Hollywood. He grew his
hair long and wore oversize clothes,
embracing himself as a grotesque. His
calling card featured an image of a
long-limbed man in a black coat and
fedora, thin arachnid arms stretching
out from a hunchbacked torso.
Sadakichi had done the drawinghimself, and a friend described the
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self-portrait as looking like a devil out
on a furlough. Another friend who
knew him in this period described him
as inhabiting the warm shelters of
mediocre people He equated love
fulfillment with oblivion and death
he made a joke out of life, drank a toast
to death. Impressed by his wit, film
people would invite him into their
homesthe fading poet and critic lent
an intellectual air to Brentwood
cocktail parties. He was their mystical
Asian, and played the role dutifully.
Douglas Fairbanks had cast him in an
uncredited role as the Mongol Princes
court magician in his 1924
swashbuckler The Thief of Bagdad. For
the part, Sadakichi requested only a
$250 salary and a case of whiskey each
week.
As the war approached, the son of
Mephistopheles and Madame Butterfly
was hounded by the U.S. government
for having two kinds of poison in his
blood, and he retreated to the small
shack he had built himself in Banning.He died in the fall of 1944, when the
war in Europe was in its final push. Its
hard to know what happened to the
resting place of his mother after she
died; her husband and two sons left
Japan forever. But what is known is
that the summer after Sadakichi died,
the Fat Man bomb was dropped over
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, ,
and with it any record of his mothers
brief life.
And this is where Pinkerton ends and
Sadakichi begins. His solid American
wives were less real to him than this
Japanese ghost. The truest love was for
the memories hed never had: the
beautiful bay of Nagasaki, the wild
chrysanthemum, the body of his
mother traveling across an ancient
landscape, unburied. There are no
perfumes to recall a life unlived.
A photograph of Sadakichi at the age of
seventy-seven shows him leaning on a
rusted gate outside his one-room
shack, wearing a long jacket tied at the
waist, a starched collar, and a tie. His
wrinkled face is shaded from the desertsun by a gray fedora with a black band.
When Sadakichi saw the photograph,
he titled it with utmost melancholy
Looking Down the Road for Visitors
That Never Come. What use was
perfume now, he wondered, except as a
frivolous decoration, a mask? Heconcluded that it might as well be used
as a disinfectant in hospitals,
institutions, and private dwellings.
But on the last few pages of In
Perfume Land, Sadakichi describes a
dream he once had that took place on a
terrace, the Fujiyama mountains in the
distance. It was the perfume concert of
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Sadakichi Hartmann:
The curtain lifts to reveal a teahouse on
the cliff of a lake, the cloth brushes
against the trees and blossoms fall to
the ground, the first perfume of the
evening. The guests waft in and out
from the teahouse, many are served
with tea, the second perfume of the
evening. Night falls, the lanterns are lit
and the dancing girls begin their song.
As they dance, their robes are cast
away, each a flower whose scent driftsthrough darkness.
Filling the air is the one bouquet
missing from his long-ago concert, the
perfume of the seventeenth minute
onward. To drink its tea, a white-
fingered lady pours hot water over theentire blossom, which stretches and
yawns until it fits snugly at the bottom
of a porcelain teacup. In the steam, the
scent of crushed chrysanthemums fills
the air.
In the foreign settlement of Dejima, theJapanese division of the calendar was notthe same as the European calendar.Sadakichi may have been born any time
between August and November in 1867 or1869. At the beginning of one of his manyshort autobiographical sketches, he wroteChapter IMy birthMy father lost hisdiary and the year of my birth will remainforever unknown to modern history.