Liza Dalby

Who is 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 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, Kimonos 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 film-maker Rob Marshall for the novel Memoirs of a Geisha and the film of the same name. She attends conferences about Japanese literature and corresponds regularly with scholars of the Japanese Heian period.