Liza Dalby

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Liza Crihfield Dalby (born 1950) 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.

Her unique experience in the geisha community led her to serve as a consultant for Arthur Golden's 2005 film Memoirs of a Geisha starring Zhang Ziyi. Golden acknowledges her assistance in the novel and describes her as "the only American woman ever to become a geisha."

She is currently working on a novel, The Hidden Buddha.

[edit] American "Geisha"

Liza Dalby has been referred to as the only non-Japanese woman to ever be a geisha. She accompanied geiko on many engagements from 1975-76, becoming popular with both customers and geisha. Of course, she never went through the formal processes of becoming a geiko herself, nor was she formally associated with any of the okiya or ochaya in Kyoto. She was often requested by customers, but note that clients were not billed for her attendance, since she had no formal association. Especially popular was her skill on the Japanese shamisen, a stringed instrument.

Dalby states: "I wrote my Ph.D. thesis, and subsequent book Geisha on this topic, and became known as the world’s only non-Japanese geisha. And that’s how I was represented in the Japanese media: aoi-me no geisha, 'the blue-eyed geisha.'"[1]

[edit] Bibliography

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.