Winner: 2025 Multimedia Essay Contest
Thank you for all the amazing multimedia essays this year–our editors and judge were blown away by your creativity, ingenuity, and innovation with form.
After reviewing a great batch of finalists, this year’s judge, Navied Mahdavian, has selected “Smell Map of Kyoto in October” by Fiona Lindsay Shen as the winner of the Fourth Genre 2025 Multimedia Essay Contest.
Of the winning essay, Navied Mahdavian remarked:
Smell is not a sense I associate with comics. It’s a visual medium with the occasional “bang!” and “boing!” to evoke sound. But memory is linked with smell, probably more so than any of our other senses. Behind its simple title (no, this is not just a “smell map”) and presentation (a single image), “Smell Map of Kyoto in October” is a moving graphic essay that explores the medium of comics in an unexpected way: through smell. It begins with the sense of distance between the person (an unnamed narrator), the actual place (Kyoto), and the map, which is supposed to translate everything for you. “We listen to the fragrance,” the author writes, mixing senses and metaphor. We realize little by little that the comic is becoming its own map, pulling us from place to place. It is an act of mapmaking and highlights the shortcomings of the medium that it is working in. One part I loved was where it says that a smell map should recommend a good place to eat. But the small noodle shop it mentions, with its smell of “beef broth and…peppermint lip gloss” is not actually a recommendation (not least of which because lip gloss is not something I associate with good eating). It gestures towards the place the way memory does. It is subtle; a trace of an experience. It is less about the place and more about the person. And it is playful: as a reader, I feel like I’m now part of the process of not just the writing, but of trying to create a conventional travel document. But of course, this is no conventional travel document. As the comic progresses, it begins to disentangle the kinds of nostalgia and sense of purity (the “authentic”) that feel touristy. The smell of “100 percent silk” vintage kimonos reveals they are actually rayon and ancient torii gates, mid-restoration, reek of insecticide. These are not new themes: the distance between person and place; experience and reality; nostalgia and the present. They are themes I myself have explored in my own writing. But I’ve never seen them explored through smell (one of my favorite films, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation explores similar themes through Tokyo’s oppressive lights and noise). “Smell Map of Kyoto in October” is doing something new, something beautiful, which feels as fresh as the smell of osmanthus.
Winner
Fiona Lindsay Shen was born in Wales, UK, and has lived in Scotland, the United States, and mainland China. She is the author of two books exploring the cultural histories of natural phenomena: Pearl: Nature’s Perfect Gem (Reaktion Books, 2022) and Silver: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books, 2017). These have appeared in Japanese and Mandarin translations. She is the biographer of an early female translator of classical Chinese poetry: Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai (Hong Kong University Press, 2012). Her current interests are in our sensory experience of the world, and she is completing an olfactory memoir about raising her children in Shanghai. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University, California. She has written for Orion magazine, the Washington Post, China Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as many art and design publications.
Fiona Lindsay Shen will receive a $500 prize. Read and experience the winning essay at the link below:
