The Tale of Murasaki

Liza Dalby

Liza Crihfield Dalby 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.