Wet earth. Loam. Bitter ash, brine on the wind. The unfurling of cedar, a smell that takes me out of this place and back to bathtubs in Japan; a portal of a scent, sacred and red. These are the smells of the Pacific Northwest wood from where I write this. In the daytime, as light pours around the unfamiliar landscape, I think of it as a new smell, something to gulp. But last night, clambering up the half-hill toward the cottage where I am staying, I took another breath and was suddenly tearful. The damp soil transformed into the smell of my Jiji, wood-smoke mimicking cigarette-smoke lingering in the folds of his shirt.

To read In Sensorium is to be made as aware of the sensuousness of place, time, and body, as I am now aware of all the smells around me. When I tried to read your essays back in my Chicago apartment, I found myself frustrated and lost in the swirling meditations. I was distracted and fractured, couldn’t slow down to digest. But here, alone in the deep quiet with nothing to do but move my body through the day, your prose has opened up for me. Or rather, I have opened up to your prose.

Can I tell you something? Something I am loath to admit for fear of sounding needy, desperate, a bit too much? I have been waiting for In Sensorium for a long, long time. I first read your work when I was in my earliest twenties, living for the first time by myself in New York City. I dove back into my childhood love of library books then, reveling in their musty stink and rough pages, weeping over someone’s Post-it Note with calorie counts left behind in a novel. I love the unintentional touching of other lives and hands offered by library books. Devoid of ownership, library books become shared experiences. I found your first novel, Bright Lines, in a library. That story whispered and pulled. But more than the narrative, I felt drawn to the writer — to you — and your view of the world. It seemed to me that you were writing something into existence — something true, blurred, soft.

For years now, I have been trying to write my own fractured history. Being hafu Japanese and white American means that I am excluded from the mythic monoethnic past my two motherlands preserve and perpetuate. I can draw no straight line between me and any ancestors by blood, and so I have been drawing a complicated tidal chart, ebbing and flowing across time, objects, and place. But this process has left me too often feeling disoriented, lost. I craved a guide, someone who could braid the political and personal with bravery and care.

I was waiting for your book not just because I was a fan, but because I thought you might offer me an example of what I am trying to see in the world. And you did. There is so much that you have written about that I did not know: moments of Bangladeshi history and dissections of Muslim, Dravidian, even Buddhist thought. There are anecdotes of your own life, of dancing and psychedelic trips and battling long COVID that were new to me. On the plane of knowledge, I encountered many moments of learning.

But In Sensorium works on a different plane too, one of sensation. In describing the smell of the Hawaiian headlands or the swollen rivers of Bangladesh, your text hums in the body of the reader — my body. Here the words begin to burrow under my skin. They force me to notice how my body experiences time, how historic events are not just two-dimensional scratchings on a page, but rather something sensory which the flesh must live through.

You talk about battling the coronavirus, of being terrified of losing your sense of smell. For you, as a perfumer, that loss had professional stakes, but your words returned my own visceral sense of loss when the same happened to me. The last thing to come back was the smell of my lover’s skin — the rising yeast of his neck, the acrid wet of his underarms — the loss of which bewildered me in bed one night when I realized that, despite my recovery weeks earlier, he was still scentless, removed from me, somehow disembodied. I am grateful that you have your scent back, and I am grateful again that I had mine returned to me too.

Lately I have been struggling to write about histories of sexual violence and my own encounters with it. My memory, something I am usually proud of, is slippery and unreliable, made unstable by doubt, fear, and anxiety. I blunder in the accounts of women who came before me, my own terror turning me clumsy and imperceptive. Tanäis, how do I describe what the last quarter of your book did to me? The care, the ferocity, the gentleness with which you describe the experience of the birangona, each perfume interlude afterward acting as an ode and an outstretched hand. You write of your own experience of rape, of objectification, of testing the bounds of your own sexuality with similar openness. But you also write of your love ceremony with Mojo, your partner, describing the love you two have built together. The bundling of cruelty, pain, and deep love together. I found respite in these pages that I did not know was seeking.

I’ve been reading Susan Sontag in tandem with you, and in one of her essays she writes that we no longer need a hermeneutics of art, but rather an erotics of art. I took this to mean understanding only gets us so far, especially now. Knowledge is only a container for interpreting something. It cannot show us how something feels, tastes, sounds, or smells. Her words echo as Russia invades Ukraine, as public health guidelines fall away, as police receive ever more money and militarized power.

To know something is not enough. Even if we know that war is wrong or gunning someone down at a traffic stop is murder, knowledge is cold. It does little to move us. It feeds what you call the “patramyth,” which I understood to be the mythic narrative of power woven by patriarchal society. Instead, you call us to make work grounded in sensation: touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. Your sensorium does that. It brings the past and the present into being, beyond the boundaries of knowing, and lingers like scent on the skin.