After a fairly mild cold, I lost my sense of smell. At first I thought it was just a blocked nose, but when the congestion cleared, I still couldn’t smell anything. The feeling is hard to describe. Losing sight or hearing — even touch (like when a tooth’s been numbed) — is imaginable. But losing smell? On the surface nothing looks wrong, and it seems to have almost no impact on daily life, yet there’s this indefinable sense of something missing.
And when you lose smell, you lose taste with it — everything really does become flavourless. I’m not a picky eater; I usually eat whatever’s in front of me, so I’d thought the loss wouldn’t affect me much. But when you experience eating something with no flavour at all — not even the flavour of wax, because there’s no flavour of wax either — it’s deeply unsettling. Appetite on one side (no satisfaction in eating) and an empty stomach on the other (no sense of having eaten anything) left me subsisting on air and nothing. A kind of immortal asceticism for someone whose appetite was already poor.
Smell is a crucial survival tool for animals — for finding food, for sensing danger, it’s often faster and more accurate than other senses. In humans the need to hunt for food or detect threats has diminished, so the instinct has weakened. Losing smell seems to cause no immediate danger, just the loss of certain pleasures: good food, flowers. But it also spares you from certain horrors: body odour, waste. For someone with my cleanliness habits, perhaps it isn’t all loss.
About a month into life as a smell-free creature, I was taking a bus home from the city one evening and had to walk through a pedestrian tunnel after getting off. The tunnel was empty, some of the lights broken, dim and stale. I quickened my pace, and halfway through, I felt something fluid rushing toward me. Not wind — the tunnel was stifling. Something startled me; I drew a sharp breath — and suddenly realised it was a smell. I looked around: nothing nearby that could produce a strong scent. I walked quickly out of the tunnel and checked the area — no flowering plants nearby. Besides, the local flora had already finished blooming for the year. I breathed deeply again: nothing. I looked back at the dark tunnel. Something seemed to be retreating.
I assumed it had been a momentary illusion and didn’t investigate. Two days later, crossing the elevated walkway nearby, I was hit again by a smell in the open air — out of nowhere. No one smoking nearby, just a constant stream of traffic roaring past below with exhaust fumes. But there in the middle of the walkway, my nose was full of something pleasant. I was transfixed, standing there in a state approaching rapture. Then it vanished as suddenly as it had come, and I plunged back into the void of nothingness.
This pattern continued: smell ambushing me in increasingly close quarters. At first outdoors, then on public transport or in building corridors, then in restaurants, even in public bathrooms. When it happened during a meal, I didn’t taste the food — instead something entered through smell and gave me a faint, elusive pleasure. I knew this wasn’t my sense of smell returning. Something else was visiting. But it came and went like the wind, untouchable. When I tried to grasp what it was, a word came to mind: 匂. Yes. It was Nioi.
Nioi is a Japanese-invented Chinese character, pronounced におい (nioi). It appears in the final section of The Tale of Genji, the “Uji Ten Chapters”. The protagonist, Kaoru, is as his name suggests — physically beautiful and always accompanied by a natural fragrance. His friend, Nioumiya, is the same; the difference being that Kaoru is devoted in love while Nioumiya is a romantic wanderer. The character 匂 means scent and smell — not necessarily pleasant.
My instinct told me that the thing visiting me was Nioi, and that it had a will of its own. I had evidence. Once, when I was walking my Shiba Inu Wu-lei, he picked up on Nioi’s approach and barked a warning at it. A dog’s nose is absolutely trustworthy, but I couldn’t have Wu-lei with me at all times.
Nioi exploited my vulnerable, smell-less state — appearing out of nowhere to get my attention, then vanishing, like playing hide-and-seek. It always gave me just a taste before hiding again, keeping me tantalizingly close and frustratingly distant. The delight and satisfaction I’d felt at first gradually turned into irritation and anger. Once, ambushed in a lift, I spoke out loud: “If you’re not going to give me back my sense of smell, stop playing games with me. I can’t see you but I know you’re there. Don’t think invisibility gives you free rein. You’re just a smell. You’re nothing.”
After that, Nioi went quiet for a while and I went on living without desire or expectation. But thinking that would make Nioi give up — that was a serious mistake. Looking back, I should have noticed the signs, especially Wu-lei’s unusual behaviour at home. I should have known that something like Nioi can’t be stopped by ordinary doors and windows. But I was careless.
That night, I’d just got into bed with the light still on when I felt something creep in and wrap itself around me. The room filled with an intoxicating scent — almost liquid in its density, thick enough to drown in. I covered my nose; the fragrance seemed to come from my own body. Then I realised it was coming from inside my nostrils. It had invaded me. I coughed and thrashed, but there was no shaking off something invisible. No — it wasn’t Nioi anymore. It was Kaoru. Not just scent, but fragrance itself. Gradually I stopped resisting, let my whole body relax, lay back, opened myself, and breathed in that intoxicating perfume freely, greedily.
When I woke up the next morning, the fragrance was gone — like a dream. But I could smell the pillow. I could smell my own skin. I got up, went to the bathroom — shower gel, toothpaste, disinfectant... all the familiar smells came back, one after another. But Nioi was gone.
To celebrate my recovered sense of smell, Dad said he’d take me out for a buffet. But for some reason I felt empty and let down. In the MTR carriage packed with sweaty bodies, I suppressed the urge to vomit. When the doors opened I fled onto the platform and breathed hard, but inhaled only the damp, stale smell of underground pipes baked by summer heat. The assault on my nose made tears come. Dad asked worriedly what was wrong. I couldn’t speak. I just thought: please let me catch another cold soon.
SF’s Strange Ordinary was originally published in Chinese in ebook format in 2025. Following it’s serialization in English translation, an English ebook version will be published. If you want to buy the Chinese version (USD 7.99), please click the link below:
Translated from the Chinese original with Claude
Picture generated with Midjourney