Japanese Incense: Kyoto Shopping

A couple of years ago, Mark and I travelled to Kyoto at the tail-end of our two-week Japan honeymoon. On the top of my Kyoto shopping list was a visit to LISN incense boutique. The company is a branch of the 300-year-old renowned incense company Shoyeido. LISN marries that traditional knowledge with a modern aesthetic sensibility - the shop is made for Instagram.

It was partially this visit to LISN, and its modern approach to incense (modern display, evocatively named scents and heady aromas) that inspired me to include a section on incense in Elements of a Home (March 17). In the book, I write about the late 8th century, Japanese practice of using incense to mark time. There were two ways of doing this: one could place an incense stick in horizontally wooden box with holes marked at specific intervals. You could tell how much time had passed by noting which hole the incense was coming from. The other way to mark time was to use an incense stick with different fragrances so that a mere sniff would tell you how much time had passed. How chic.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of scent, I also wrote about the history of the rose and potpourri in Elements of a Home, but another amazing book that deals deftly with the history of scent is Fragrant: A Secret Life of a Scent by my Bay Area neighbor and marvelous perfumer, Mandy Aftel.