Liza Crihfield Dalby (born 1950) is an American anthropologist and novelist specializing in Japanese culture. For her graduate studies, Dalby studied and performed fieldwork in Japan of the geisha community of Ponto-chō, which she wrote about in her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled The institution of the geisha in modern Japanese society. Since that time, she has written five books. Her first book, Geisha, was based on her early research. The next book, Kimono: Fashioning Culture is about traditional Japanese clothing and the history of the kimono. This was followed with a fictional account of the Heian era noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, titled The Tale of Murasaki. In 2007 she wrote a memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice, which was followed two years later by a second work of fiction, Hidden Buddhas.
Dalby is considered an expert in the study of the Japanese geisha community, and acted as consultant to novelist Arthur Golden and filmmaker Rob Marshall for the novel Memoirs of a Geisha and the film of the same name.
Background
As a high school student, Dalby visited Japan in a student exchange program; there she learned to play the , the traditional three stringed Japanese guitar. In 1975, she returned to Japan for a year to research the geisha community, as part of her anthropology fieldwork. Dalby's research, done as part of her Ph.D. studies at Stanford University, was presented in her dissertation, and became the basis for her first book, Geisha, about the culture of the geisha community. Her study, which included interviews with more than 100 geisha, was considered to be excellent and received praise from scholars at the time of publication, although some retrospective scholarship is more critical.
During her Ph.D. studies about the geisha community, conducted first in Tokyo and then Pontochō in Kyoto, she was invited to join a geisha house in Kyoto, after her primary contact in the city, a former geisha who had gone by the name of Ichiraku in her working days, suggested it. Dalby began attending banquets under the name Ichigiku, with another geisha, Ichiume, acting as her ceremonial "older sister".
Though Dalby was fluent in Japanese and skilled at playing the , she performed at geisha parties and banquets, collectively referred to as , in an unofficial capacity, having never undergone the rites of debuting as a geisha due to the temporary nature of her stay in Japan. As such, she was not paid for her performances, though guests and various geisha "mothers" within the community would not uncommonly give her a tip for her time. Though Dalby's experience of geisha society was conducted for academic purposes, Dalby formed strong friendships and relationships with geisha in both Kyoto and Tokyo, and came to be regarded as talented in the skills required to be a geisha:
<blockquote>On my last visit [to the Yamabuki in Yoshichō, Tokyo]...the proprietress [of the house] felt she had to say something. "When we first met, Kikuko, you were so studious—all those serious questions that we had to try and answer. You've really changed a lot... I'd say your training in Pontochō has taken very well. What a waste to go back to your country now, when you could be such a wonderful geisha!"</blockquote>
Works
Geisha
Dalby's first non fiction book, Geisha (filmed as American Geisha), is based on her experiences in Japan's various geisha communities, specifically within the district of Pontochō in Kyoto. In the book, Dalby writes of her experiences in both the contemporary geisha communities of the mid 1970s and the experiences of geisha in previous decades, emphasising a number of changes in the community and the profession of geisha stemming from WWII, changes in the economy and the changing status of women in wider Japanese society, amongst other issues. Dalby writes about the tightly knit geisha community, and the lives of the geisha within its hierarchical society of female artists, cutting between vignettes from her experiences in the geisha community and wider explanations of the many facets of geisha in Japanese society.
Kimono
thumb|left|[[Murasaki Shikibu depicted in formal Heian period clothing in this 17th century illustration by Tosa Mitsuoki]]
Geisha was followed by a book about kimono, entitled Kimono: Fashioning Culture; Fashioning Culture leading on from the last chapter of Geisha, which briefly covers kimono in the context of geisha. In an interview with Salon.com, Dalby explained that in 11th century Japanese court literature, female authors such as Murasaki Shikibu wrote lengthy descriptions of the clothing people wore, with outright descriptions of people's faces or names considered highly rude and almost non-existent in Heian period literature, meaning that definitions of beauty and high fashion of the time period centred around the symbolism represented in the layering of clothing and its interaction with the depiction of nature and the seasons in Heian period art and literature. The fine interaction between clothing and art was often described in texts such as Murasaki's The Tale of Genji.
The Tale of Murasaki
thumb|[[Heian era court life depicted in a 19th century illustration of The Tale of Genji by Hiroshige]]
Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, a fictional biography of Murasaki Shikibu, 11th century court poet, whose work The Tale of Genji is considered a classic, was published in 2000. Dalby stated her decision to write a fictional account of Murasaki's life was driven by the fact that she "couldn't contribute anything scholarly".
Hidden Buddhas
Dalby's second novel, Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos, was published in 2009, in which she returns to writing fiction. In this book, set in modern day Japan, Paris, and California, she writes a story set against the backdrop of the concept of (secret Buddha statues) in Japanese Buddhist temples.
Books
- Geisha, University of California Press, 1st edition, 1983,
- All Japan: The Catalogue of Everything Japanese, 1984,
- Kimono: Fashioning Culture, Yale University Press, 1993,
- The Tale of Murasaki, First Anchor Books, 2000,
- East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons, University of California Press, 2007,
- Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos, Stone Bridge Press, 2009