michelle legro_a trip to japan in sixteen minutes

7/30/2019 Michelle Legro_A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes

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15/05/13 8:09 AMThe Believer - A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes Michelle Legro

Page 1 of 30http://www.believermag.com/issues/201305/?read=article_legro

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


27/29



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.

michelle legro_a trip to japan in sixteen minutes

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