"A ginger odor" is both a diary and an epistolary novel (one way because the player discovers that the letters written by the heroine and never those it receives). So through his own writings we met Mary Mackenzie, Scottish 20 year old who in 1903 left his homeland and through half the globe by boat to go to China to marry a virtually unknown. She moved to Beijing soon after the Boxer Rebellion. But soon, the weight of conventions, its existence relegated to the Legation Quarter and smothers her marriage. Its existence is turned upside down she commits adultery with an officer from the Japanese aristocracy. At the price of a dramatic abandonment, she flees China to Japan, where the wait even more painful trials ... Yet she chooses to remain in this country where life is so difficult for women, and ends up find its place. Through his eyes, the reader discovers the astonishing post-Meiji Japanese society and its evolution towards militarism and imperialism. The story of Mary coincides with the great history of this first half of the twentieth century, particularly troubled period in the Far East. "A ginger smell" is beautiful and moving story of an extraordinary woman, early feminist, feminist before the birth of feminism! A book that deserves its title of 'cult novel "and that everyone (and especially every woman) must have read in your life!