SCENT: Scent tour of Hiroshige’s Seasons at the Brooklyn Museum

On a recent weekday afternoon, a group of mostly New Yorkers filed into a gallery at the Brooklyn Museum holding little slips of white paper beneath their noses.

We were attending the museum’s series of scent tours, part its current show Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo. The tours were led by Jessica Murphy, the museum’s manager of group experiences and a fragrance historian herself. The idea was to take visitors on a guided tour through the four seasons as expressed in Hiroshige’s circa-1850s woodblock print series, pairing the mood of each season with two smells, one natural and one human-made. Murphy partnered with Brooklyn-based fragrance-maker Joya Studio to develop the moods and historical contexts she wanted to evoke in each fragrance. As she explained, during Hiroshige’s time, Tokyo—then known as Edo—was a city under construction. Printmaking was a popular and accessible art form, and meisho-e, or pictures of famous places, were reproduced in bulk. A single print cost about as much as a bowl of noodles, so these images were affordable for many people. The Brooklyn Museum’s complete collection of the 100 Famous Views was discovered by chance in the mid-1970s in its climate-controlled library, perfectly preserved in a box. Upon closer inspection, the set turned out to be a “deluxe” edition, complete with specks of mica and textural details  Hiroshige worked into the prints for higher-end consumers.

We began with spring. Murphy explained that after the basic black outline of a scene was printed with a “master block,” a different woodblock was used for each color and shade, which were superimposed on the image one after another. Murphy’s assistant handed out the first scent strip, a natural scent labeled “Flower Temple.” It was intended to evoke Japan’s famous spring cherry blossoms—in this case, the feeling of the petals falling on your skin and the dappled light the branches cast on the ground, as cherry blossoms don’t have a strong fragrance. The person next to me whispered that it smelled more like bug repellent, and though I regretfully concurred, I loved the idea of trying to suggest a tactile and visual sensation through smell. I pressed the paper to my nostrils and tried to will it to transport me beneath the boughs, a cup of warm tea cupped between my palms.

Murphy explained that during the Edo period, cherry blossom viewing was not only a civic duty but a spiritual one. A few museumgoers, seeing us perform our sniffing rites, tried to infiltrate our group but were gently outed by Murphy’s assistant. Undeterred, they continued to linger on the edges, trying to catch passing whiffs of our strips, and eavesdropping when she handed out folded papers with haikus printed on them. We took turns reading the poems, noting how the haikus often incorporated multisensory experiences in their seventeen syllables. We moved on to summer and to a natural scent called “Waterway,” which was cedary, resinous, and cool. This one certainly brought me into the scenes of lakes and rivers and ponds. There was something delightful about communing with images in a public place, across centuries, through the medium of scent: trying to smell our way into Hiroshige’s infinitesimal figures steering sailboats or hauling wagons across bridges. What would their world have smelled like, and how was it different from the smells of a 2024 spring day in New York City?

When I asked Murphy what her keywords had been  in developing “Waterway” with Joya, she said she’d imagined water that was murky, green, and a bit boggy from use, as the city’s water would have been in the nineteenth century, when it was used for bathing, transportation, fishing, laundry. “And for security!” piped up one participant, noting the moat surrounding the shogun’s palace in the city center. The man-made summer scent was “Lumber,” and the prints were mounted on a handsome wood partition that Murphy told us had itself been delightfully fragrant when it was first installed. Because Edo was in a perpetual state of construction in the 1800s, and because such a large proportion of the buildings were wooden, she imagined that the smell of fresh-cut lumber would have been redolent, especially in the heat of summer. The summer fragrance was also supposed to suggest petrichor, or the smell of hot stone when it is first hit by water, as the streets might have been during the sudden summer rainstorms common in the area.

The natural fragrance for autumn was named “Foliage,” and she said it was intended as a “fantasy,” with undertones of “pine and crumbly leaf.” (To me it smelled more like men’s cologne.) The man-made scent was called “Fireworks,” and did indeed bring to mind the ashy scent of “hot sparks in the cooling night air,” as Murphy put it, but with a rooty, almost carroty undercurrent, in my impression. She also pointed out that coal was used for heating and cooking during this period, so in autumn the streets would likely have been filled with smoky scents from both quotidian tasks and celebrations.

In winter, the first scent was “Snow Bridge,” a chilly, sparkly smell, with a menthol “buzz,” as one visitor put it. To complement this natural smell was the human-made “Yakiimo,” or roasted sweet potato, a popular and warming street food. Though we loved the idea of a potato perfume, few of us could detect the vegetable in the scent; it smelled like floral handsoap to me. But as I sniffed and gazed at the scene, I imagined tucking a hot sweet potato into my coat pocket and munching on it as I strolled through the falling snow.

As we clustered around the final winter scenes, sniffing our strips of sweet potatoes, a stylish elderly man in a dragon-printed knit cardigan slipped into our group and discretely contributed his own flatulent fragrance to our scent journey. I tried to escape his aroma by looking at some of the vitrines with tea boxes and original woodblocks, but somehow it trailed me wherever I went. Somehow, I feel Hiroshige would have smiled at this odor that was at once natural and man-made, and one that transcends the centuries and the seasons.