page_title: Liza Dalby
section_title: The Tale of Murasaki
hierarchical_section_title: Liza Dalby / Works / The Tale of Murasaki
caption_attribution_description: English: Utsusemi from the series: "Tale of Genji in Fifty-four Chapters" 日本語: 源氏物語五十四帖　空蝉
context_page_description: 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 which she wrote about in her Ph.D. dissertation. Since that time, she has written five books. Her first book, Geisha, was based on her early research. The next book, Kimono is about traditional Japanese clothing and the history of the kimono. She followed that 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 has 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.
context_section_description: Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, a fictional biography of Murasaki Shikibu, an 11th-century court poet, whose work The Tale of Genji is  considered a classic, was published in 2000. Dalby says that she decided to write a fictional account of Murasaki's life because she "couldn't contribute anything scholarly". Fascinated by the 11th-century Heian period court culture, she wove much of it into the book: writing about the clothing the women wore; the love affairs they had; the manner in which poetry was frequently exchanged; and that women lived in seclusion, behind screens, with their faces often unseen by lovers. Dalby explains that the geisha society did not develop until at least 500 years later, and that a court lady-in-waiting such as Murasaki would not have had the temperament to be a geisha because Murasaki was reserved, whereas geisha are expected to be outgoing.
caption: Heian era court life depicted in a 19th-century ukiyo-e illustration of The Tale of Genji by Hiroshige
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