Liza Dalby
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Liza Crihfield Dalby is an American anthropologist and novelist specializing in Japanese culture.
She is a 1972 graduate of Swarthmore College, received her Masters in 1974 and received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1978. The title of her dissertation is "The Institution of the Geisha in Modern Japanese Society". Upon receiving her Ph.D. she accepted her first teaching position at the University of Chicago. She is married to Michael Dalby, managing director of Stylus LLC. They have 3 children: Marie, Owen and Chloë, and live in Berkeley, California.
In 1975 she went to Japan on a Fulbright scholarship to research geisha for ther Ph.D. thesis. Her book Geisha (filmed as American Geisha) is based on her experiences with the geisha community in Kyoto's Pontochō. Although she accompanied geiko-friends on some of their engagements (with one serving as her 'older sister'), she was not officially associated with any of the okiya or ochaya in Kyoto. Her attendance at such parties was at the invitation of her friends only, and clients were not billed for her attendance.
Her unique experience in the geisha community led her to serve as a consultant for Arthur Golden's book and the matching 2005 movie Memoirs of a Geisha starring Zhang Ziyi. Golden acknowledges her assistance in the novel and describes her, apparently incorrectly, as "the only American woman ever to become a geisha."
She is currently working on her novel The Hidden Buddha.
[edit] Works
- Dalby, Liza Crihfield (1983). Geisha. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04742-7.
- Dalby, Liza Crihfield (1993). Kimono: fashioning culture. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05639-7.
- Dalby, Liza Crihfield (2000). The Tale of Murasaki. First Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49795-4.
- Dalby, Liza Crihfield (2007). East wind melts the ice. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-25053-2.
