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 (7 comments total)

Oh, this is lovely.
posted by zamboni at 7:42 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]

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

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 [1 favorite]

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

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