Sixth Section of ''Hypocorism'' (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Murasakino, by Aton
Murasakino is a chypre in spirit. It opens with a bright neroli top, moves through a floral-fruity heart of peach and white florals, and settles into a velvety dark base of oud and leather. True, it lacks the classical chypre foundation of labdanum and oakmoss. Yet the essential chypre tension remains intact. There is a continual struggle between brightness and darkness and, as in the best chypres, the brightness penetrates all the way to the core rather than merely floating above it—as if sunlight has been absorbed into the forest floor. Even in the base—the area that anyone who wanted to argue this is not a chhyupre would point to—you still find that quintessential earthy leatheriness. Here, however, it emerges not from moss and labdanum but from Cambodian oud, saffron, and likely an unlisted cypriol.
Despite its overtly feminine florals (horse-sweat jasmine, creamed-banana ylang-ylang, dirty-soap neroli), the fragrance possesses a profoundly masculine tobacco core—a core I suppose is even more prominent in Manly, a collab with Russian Adam that I have yet to smell. This comes not only from the tobacco absolute itself but also from the Cambodian oud, which contributes an impression of rum-dipped cherry tobacco, and from the blue chamomile, whose hay-like facet recalls Chergui—only, and as one would expect from blue chamomile rather than the Roman variety, the effect here is more fermented, damp, and herbal.
The leather aspect stands out to me more and more with each wear. This is fundamentally a floral-animalic leather. Saffron plays a major role in creating the leather illusion, while the likely presence of cypriol contributes a boot-polish darkness that merges beautifully with the saffron. At times the leather feels metallic and furry, like roadkill drying by the roadside.
This was the scent I wore on the day I had to take Fille to the hospital for her heart failure. Ever since, whenever I bring her back for a checkup, I feel compelled to wear it again—though now I make sure to spray it hours in advance. I always joke that Fille’s signature scent is Teatro Alla Scala, using the same irony by which one might nickname a huge bruiser “Tiny.” Yet I now think Murasakino is an even better signature scent for her, despite the fact that it naturally reminds me most of Grandpa Jack.
Blackcurrant is one of the key materials here. And it is oen of the key materials reinforcing my association with both Fille and my grandpa. It brings a musky cattiness that works wonders with the civet. The blackcurrant-civet combination may be the true secret of the composition. The sulfurous facets of blackcurrant amplify the civet’s feline-urine pungency, reinforcing the association with Fille, who was so sick on the day I first wore this that she urinated in her carrier on the way to the hospital.
Blackcurrant contributes more than just cat piss. It also possesses a tomato-leaf greenness that introduces a sharp bitterness into the civet, much as rose often does in traditional civet perfumes. This effect is strong enough that one could almost swear there is a green rose somewhere in the formula. Blackcurrant also lends a sweaty-hair or damp-fur impression that seems either amplified by the unlisted cumin or perhaps partially responsible for the cumin-like aura itself. The tobacco and birch tar, working with that civet and cumin, make this more literally thought eh smell of my grandpa. He did not have runnign water and he was a smoker. His skin smelled of nicotine and dry sweat.
The florals themselves are heavy and stuffy like the stank air beneath a Victorian skirt where after your arm ruffles through enough material you get to a split-crotch underwear—giving you the effect that the source of life is like an eye. The neroli cuts through this density. It combines with the civet too, like the black current and the skanky florals, to create a screeching, pissy sharpness—the opposite of the honeyed roundness found in fragrances like Civet de Nuit.
The brightness occasionally even reads as rosy—not red rose but a green, bright rose effect—which may simply be the interaction of neroli and blackcurrant. Rubbery floral facets further increase the fragrance’s weight. There is also a notable sweetness in the base, almost like an adult candy.
The violet-colored atmosphere of the fragrance is another fascinating aspect. Lavender and violet leaf combine to create a purple aura. The violet leaf possesses the same dewy, gassy quality found in Amouage Portrayal Man but here—mixed with birch tar, oud, and likely cypriol—it takes on a charcoal darkness. The image that comes to mind is the blackened skin of coal miners or chimney sweeps: dew mixed with soot fog, soot rain.
This fragrance is often compared to Royal Barn. There is that tobacco-civet-jasmine trifgecta, yes—as well as that horse stable feel. But Royal Barn comes off more green and musky and less leathery and tarry. I find Murasakino much louder and more aggressive on the civet, at least if I associate more aggressive with a younger and freshed and more pungent form (one very simialr by the way to what I get in Oud Infini). Murasakino pushes hard into a fresh, pissy-animalic direction, whereas the Areej composition feels greener, murkier, and rounded into more of a musk perfume than a chypre. Murasakino probably speaks to me more directly.
I have come to realize that I am something of a civet fanatic. Unlike Kinamo—which many feel, includign myself I think, is more aggressively animalic because of its glut of indoles—Murasakino uses real civet absolute. It belongs much more naturally beside Civet Regale and Blue Civet Dream, two of my favorite civet fragrances. All three are complex compositions, though Blue Civet Dream seems more focused on civet itself. In both the Elkhaldi and the Pinoy fragrances, civet does most of the heavy lifting. In Murasakino, by comparison, it is more thoroughly woven into the composition—though “woven in” is relative, since by most standards it still dominates center stage.
The Elkhaldi may be my favorite of the group, though my preference alternates between it and the Aton—the Aton soemtimes takign the top spot because of how the blackcurreent brings such a feline-piss element that it has a synergistic effect with the civet. What I especially admire about Murasakino is its blend of vintage and artisanal sensibilities. The peach and cumin feel distinctly vintage, while the dusty oud replaces the classical chypre anchors, particularly dusty oakmoss. It reminds me of the balancing act found in Wasif Reza’s Peau d’Orris Gold 50.
The opening is tremendous—easily one of my top twenty fragrance openings. This is a chypre delivered with Teatro Alla Scala levels of bombast, but in an undeniably masculine form. The opening erupts in a blinding cloud of civet reinforced by flowers. Initially, one assumes the cumin is the primary source of the animalic effect. Just when you think Prin—and even Corticchiato with Aziyadé—have shown you everything this territory can offer, the fog clears and you realize the civet itself is doing the roaring.
This fragrance is aggressive. I find it amusing that Ramsey regards it as less aggressive than many Prin fragrances. What challenges one person will not necessarily challenge another. For me, Murasakino competes with Homa and Arsalan as one of the most stomach-churning fragrances in my collection. Althouygh it lacks the Prin exotic spcie blend that can make people real, the civet alone has impression—especially when combined with the black current and vulvic white florals—of a lady wipign her vagina after takign a piss and—front to back the rule, never back to frotn—swiping her anus in the process: chef’s kiss.
The drydown transitions beautifully. The fragrance gradually becomes soapy and floral before settling into a classic masculine saddle leather accord. And what a drydown it is: super-macho, ashy tobacco and leather. One of my favorite openings and one of my favorite drydowns.
Murasakino often feels like Prin meets Areej. It lacks the polished elegance of an Ensar or a Bortnikoff. Instead, it is confrontational and unapologetic. The result is a hyper-masculine fragrance with Teatro Alla Scala bombast. A tremendous fragrance. Unbelievable, really. A top-fifty scent for me without question. It belongs, like its brother Kinamo, alongside the wild animalic fragrances: from Prin’s Homa to Kashti’s Chandrahas.
*Let's workshop the sixth section of my story, novel-length now, that examines the intricate power dynamics and linguistic structures at play in a man's passionate relationship with a girl he deems too young.
Sixth Section of “Hypocorism”
Born from an Argus-eyed solicitude that even those with the most conservative values would find adorable if only they could put down their moral inhibitions and mental blocks, the rule looked great on the whiteboard. A few drymarker slicings made butter of the Gordian Knot. But the mess of reality could not be neatened to squeaking squiggles, no matter how geometrical the method. It was not simply that introducing a monitor would interfere with their organic chemistry. Their connection already reposing with such strength that no compliance audit could ever sterilize it for the corporate cubicle (napped partition walls bound to get soaked with thud-landing warmth, salty-sweet propulsions arcing upon coworkers eating their sandwiches under the otherwise anodyne fluorescence), it was a low price to pay for her safety.
The matter was procuring the third. Finding a trustworthy adult capable of seeing clearly, unblinded by desire or fear, and yet willing to carry out the job as active abettor, facilitator of record—he knew that was unlikely, ludicrous even. That is why he had taken to apologizing after his lectures, citing the broken-record aspect rather than—in his shame for being as in-touch as a textbook—the deeper reason shining like scalp under a combover. And that is why she, although still submitting to his seat-of-his-pants stewardship, had taken to not letting him off the hook so easily—the decrease of her cursing mouth (all her “nigga this, nigga that”) directly proportional to her increase in vocal pushback, two consequences of his grooming of which he would be proud. “It’s fine. I’m just—. Like it sound like talk.”
Few people would fit the bill. Where would he even start to locate one? He could not just put up some ISO on Facebook like he might for a vintage bottle of Antaeus. He would have to go to dark places: Telegram, those Chans he did not understand. That they were FBI honeypots was the least of it. He would be damned before he trafficked with the types who infested such sinister places. The stigma that minor-attracted people wanted to rape children was strong enough, stronger perhaps even than yesterday’s stigma that gay men wanted to bugger boys. He would not feed it.
How would the ISO even read? And who would even want to do it? Who would not already be biased severely one way or the other, rendering the vetting moot from an ethical perspective? How could he know that the candidate was not just a creep in disguise, perhaps ready to blackmail for a piece of the dirty pie themselves? The mere process of trying to hunt one down would itself make him susceptible to the law. The incriminating snail trail, much more permanent than what runs down her thighs, would make him vulnerable forever to come even if everything worked out.
He knew the rule would in all likelihood foreclose what they both wanted. Love might have made him dumb, but not that dumb. Her words looped in his head. “Like it sound like talk.” Why would he keep insisting upon it, then? He did not want to dwell on the whys. He just wanted to be with her in the healthiest way he could. Bowling with bumpers was better than not bowling at all. Both agreed on that.
The frustration, however, only fueled his self-exploration. More than just the self-play—self-play that Victorian and libertine alike might agree to call “self-abuse”—that had him smacking his own testicles with a bratty hand he imagined was hers, it fueled the introspective scrutiny—already as automatic to him as touching his face when uncertain—that had him dredging up motive possibilities upon which few aside from writers hungry for material or lovers wanting to ensure the purity of their intentions would stare. And in the black of his bedroom after dropping her off, his medial prefrontal cortex burned with that isolated intensity of a nighttime Tokyo seen from nearby orbit: an island of self-obsession neon against a sea of sleeping circuitry.
The one boulder he could not get around, clinking his shovel soon after every stab at fresh soil, was the very logic of his teen-girl fantasies. What he would dream, how he would dream, suggested that the rule might have had kinky roots—perhaps even its girthiest taproot—in his very own yum. These fantasies, colorful since before she was born (although nothing even close to the daily frequency through his late teens and twenties), had in common—with rare, if any, exception—a deep erotic investment in restraint, centered as they were around what his third-party rule entailed: indefinite forestalling on grounds of concern for the girl’s welfare.
Any dream girl who came onto him he would deny. Usually it happened after some rescue scene, and usually one where—make of it what you will—an adult was trying to take sexual advantage of her. Dinner, shower, sleepover (somehow she would end up back at his house)—all this escalation and yet he would keep denying her. He might walk in on the girl spread open with pretzel-position demands and he would still refuse, throwing a blanket over her. “Please,” he would say, despite feeling how easy it would be—looking at the immobile hunk of cloth, starting to dampen in the sweet spot—to wreck that little hole when the whole to which it was connected was covered from sight. “Stop this Samantha. Please.” He would sit her down at the table, ready to guard her from herself and from his own desires. There he would insist, full of the feel-good electricity of a control freak with a savior complex, that they needed to wait—and that, even then, he would want her parents to know there had been mutual attraction when she was underage. And even as he would wait in bed, stiff with prurient vigilance, for those little tiptoes down the hall, he would say “No” at the first creak of the door or, if she had a nightmare an insisted on being there, before her little hand on his thigh got to his testicles.
Sometimes she would not have parents. Sometimes he would confess how badly he needed to manhandle her. Sometimes he would instruct her on how to clean her pussy, telling her to be okay with her smell and about microbiomes and about the perils of douching as he handed her a warm washrag with eyes averted. Whatever the twist, any titillation he might have found in the prospect of a downy-fuzzed spinner always gave way to putting his foot down on the ethical boundary that would mean the girl not getting what she wanted. Some stormed off to another room and slammed the door. “You’re worth being protected, little Miss,” he would call out, faithful in his heart that something of his caretaking words would worm into their spoiled ears.
Flirting is cute but tension, everyone knows, is what makes someone crave you. It would not be wrong, and he faced this through discomfort, to call his denial a strategy to drive the girl wild in heat. But the truth was that genuine concern for her welfare plus the radical hypervigilence of his nature (he was seven years old overthinking mole sizes and colors and edge patterns, a St. Jude commercial hunching him into panic when every other kid was outside in the sun)—that was the root of the denial. The seductive efficacy, a downstream effect of his native comportment, did start to play more of an intentional role. But it was hard to say, even so, that his aim was to groom the girls ravenous enough to put him into a corner where his dick would be forced—so forced that he could feel much less guilty, her eyes wide in sudden fear (kiddie eyes searching his for some clue of how bad this would get), about the pounding for which she had been asking. “Put those fuckin arms back, bitch! Push me one more time!” For with exception to those turns of events where the girl threatened to go to the cops or kill herself if he did not give in (curveballs that turned his fantasies into such nightmares that he typically pulled away from them, popping the sims bubble), nothing could make him give in. Leaping on him, inner thighs slavered in that slime you only ever get from little girls, would not be good enough. It would take argumentation, weeks of work, on his mind—and from someone with a pluck and persuasion, a logical dimension, uncommon at that age (vanishingly rare in this era). Extended dialogues full of hearing out each side like some court case, moreover, were not really made for the nature—let alone for the curtailed time span—of even his driest erotic fantasies.
It would be a gross oversimplification to explain his fantasies as just a matter of delay itself carrying a charge. Absence, not having what you want, does make the heart grow finder, of course. But there was more to it than that. He got off less by touching than by covering all his ethical bases—covering them, however, without sacrificing his liberality. He liked the edge. Desire found its voltage in holding the line no matter the stank of temptation, in proving—to himself most of all—that he could do the right thing and yet still not resort to the repression and hangups of the hoi poloi. He had been thinking this way, dreaming this way, since at least twenty. Threading the tightest of needles—that was a higher eroticism.
It was a matter, and this seemed to cut right to the heart of why he would insist on the false-hope rule blocking their togetherness, of appeasing his multifaceted conscience. His intellectual conscience—ready to appreciate the no-one-size-fits-all nuance of individual situations—told him that taboos were not infallible, that there were exceptions, and that just because beliefs are longstanding does not mean they are right. His social conscience, on the other hand, told him that there was deep wisdom in taboos. Even if their defenders were often pitchfork types too benighted to articulate rationales for their maintenance, even if their upholders were Superbowl-halftime monkeys who see nothing wrong with factory-farmed torture full of rape racks and electrojacks but become murderous when they hear of a man jerking his dog into a state of relief, he still respected folk wisdom. Indeed, guarding the lessons we have inherited from our ancestors only grew in importance the more conservative he became. The rules could be hamfisted and the reasons given for those rules could be sound childish. But there could still be deep practical wisdom there that we would not want to throw out. The taboo on pork was case and point. He had the humility to know, however much he prodded and even mocked the most fundamental taboos (necrophilia, bestiality, incest), that they were in place for a reason such that it would be wiser to place a bonsai artist rather than a lumberjack at the frontier of progress.
The need to listen up to folk wisdom was especially crucial in the case at hand. No matter how drastically their norms have differed (some see eating their dead loved ones as a sacred act of love; some see slurping food as the highest ways to praise the chef), every society prioritizes the welfare of children—ensuring their survival, if not actively shepherding them into adulthood. Otherwise there would be no society.
Of course, there will be differences in what counts as a legitimate exception to the rule. Some societies buried infants or put them on ice rafts if they could not care for them. Some sacrificed children to ensure the gods kept the sun rising, or to lift the most beautiful of those children into the rank of the gods themselves. Some put kids to work under dangerous conditions. But even here, if we bracket off those rare cases where child welfare is sacrificed for mere adult power or prestige (as in exiling an illegitimate child to protect a father’s public image), it was all done either as an unfortunate necessity to ensure the wellbeing of the greatest number or as somehow helpful to the victimized child itself—whether that be saving it from a miserable future or even improving its character or status.
The rule, then, let him honor child-welfare taboos without surrendering the honesty of head or heart. It was a way to play it safe until little more than time rendered the question moot. Since honoring his conscience was crucial to his identity, the rule was just as much about preventing himself from being altered beyond recognition. Falling in love with a minor—that itself would not challenge his identity. Others might feel vertigo after the cumshot, unable to stomach the mirror image of the girl wrapped around him like a sleepy toddler. But he had no post-nut clarity crisis about whether it was okay to be who he was. He would smooch her on the head and tuck her in with blessing that her days be bright. Marrying the girl, having babies with her (even though he long said he did not want anymore kids)—none of these things in themselves would haunt him. None of them would haunt him so long as all the prerequisites for ethical permissibility were met in his mind, and assuming he could bracket off all the utilitarian factors—above all the police factor and the reputation factor, the reputation factor still mattering to some extent even though he had already committed social suicide with his writing (it was just that the news, in full vivid detail, had yet to reach everyone’s ears, like Nietzsche said of God’s murder). Plunging into such forbidden love without proper safeguards, failing to cover all his bases—that is what would tremble his core.
The world was messy with inheritance—traditions, taboos, illusions that kept people functional. However much truth and justice and love might be on his side, it would be cruel to trample that. He did not want to model that for her. Sheltered freshmen destroyed by a single seminar on the problem of evil, lifelong believers shattered by the mere fact that God’s existence was debatable—he had seen what happened when people pressed realities on those unprepared to hear them. He knew how this would sound, and she would be among the first to object. But there was wisdom in the homosexual closet of the mid-twentieth century. Work smart not hard. Forcing the issue sometimes brought unnecessary suffering. He did not want to be bursting on the scene like one of those savior stereotypes, high on born-again fervor, who shake things up without empathy for where people are at (their identities, relationships, purposes)—one of those insensitive idealists unable to restrain their bushy-tail impatience to rip people out of a matrix that was all they knew. Just because he had seen the horror of factory farming did not mean people needed it shoved down their throats without even the common courtesy of gag-reflex training beforehand. The foreplay of education was called for—the slow work of persuasion, the grooming of gradualism. Any mature heart would it so.
Fifteen years ago he would have given into passion with the girl just as easily as he had destroyed the identity of more than one small-town blonde who came into his class ready to evangelize. But now he walked more on eggshells out of respect for the sleeping. He heard the girl, yes. Perhaps he had become too careful. She had many things to teach him. But he knew he had something important to teach her too: respect for others and tradition, however lacking in nuance—respect for even a flawed social fabric.
Stressing balance, modeling it if possible—that is what the teaching came down to. She had been all too eager to speak up against stupid rules and illogical practices. She was the type of student to call a teacher out for assigning mere busy work—yes, even if it pissed off fellow classmates who just wanted to coast. Had she been on the conformist-quietist side of the spectrum, always jumping through hoops but never questioning them, his nudge would have been in the opposite direction. But she was bent hard against compliance. And not only that, she was parentless in a cyber world where—in what amounts to a perfect primer for imminence of AI spouses—the more the algorithm learns you the more you find yourself surrounded by yes-man memes and my-truth quotes reflecting back at you exactly what you want to hear, reinforcing your native orientation and—packaging it in the best, most heroic or noble, light—even stoking it.
A boat-rocker like her, the danger was, could easily become wrapped—trapped—in bubbles that filter out the friction of counter-messages: “Discipline is doing what needs to be done, even when you don’t want to”; “The system was built by those who came before you for a reason”; “True leadership is knowing when to follow”; “Hoops separate those who have disciple and stamina from those who don’t”; “Master the rules of the game so you can play it better than anyone else.” Indeed, these bubbles—amplifying the messages already inside—were prone to encourage more rocking, harder rocking: “If you aren’t making people uncomfortable, you aren’t growing”; “Well-behaved bitches seldom make history”; “Your boundaries are not up for negotiation”; “Never shrink to fit a room”; “Burn the table if they won’t give you a seat.”
The need, in effect, was for real diversity—not the shallow optical diversity that had become all the rage among groups fighting (especially in both her secondary ed and his higher ed) under the banner of diversity; not the most superficial phenomic diversity too much in organic alignment with the antidiversity cyber bubbles and echo chambers to read as conspiracy (unless these cyber bubbles themselves were products of conspiracy rather than organic outcroppings of our native tribalism and hate for the outsider). Nudging was not about moving her to the opposite extreme but into the virtuous middle of strategic equilibrium: neither a mere boat rocker challenging everything nor a mere passenger challenging nothing but rather a skilled navigator who knows when and when not to adjust the sails.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
