Book Information
Japanese title (English gloss): The Emperor of Scent: Genius Scientist Luca Turin Takes On the Mystery of Smell
(Original title: The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses)
Author: Chandler Burr
Publication year: 2003
Publisher: Hayakawa Publishing
Not a single person knows how we smell.
Chandler Burr
In fact, human beings should not be able to smell at all.
Book Review
I think smell retains something that the other senses have lost. When you listen to music, you can identify the composer. If it is not an original piece, you can even point out who influenced the composer most strongly. Yet with famous works of scent, you cannot identify their creator, even though many perfumes are actually the work of the same perfumer. Perfumes have no “signature.”
Luca Turin
With his brilliant descriptions of scent and acerbic criticism, Luca Turin can put ordinary people off. This book, based on close reporting on him, sent shock waves through perfume companies and the fragrance industry. Its author, Chandler Burr, is a gifted writer who wrote a fragrance column for The New York Times. With his skillful prose, he makes not only Turin’s personality and feelings about scent but also the mechanism of smell, the subject of Turin’s research, engaging and easy to understand.
Because the entire book is built around Luca Turin’s research into the mystery of smell, a university-level knowledge of chemistry will help you understand roughly 30% of its content better. Even without that background, however, it is an exceptionally interesting book. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to explore new theories and the world of scent in greater scientific depth. To delve further into the mechanism of smell described here, try The Secret of Scent (in Japanese) by Luca Turin.
Might we not predict the future of biology over the next few centuries fairly accurately by the time it will take to explain smell completely and comprehensively? For smell… contains every mystery within each and every instance of it.
Lewis Thomas
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