Liza Dalby
| Liza Crihfield Dalby | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 (age 66–67) |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Ichigiku |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Education | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Anthropologist, geisha |
| Known for | anthropologist and novelist specializing in Japanese culture |
| Website | www |
Liza Crihfield Dalby (born 1950) 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.
As a high school student, Dalby visited Japan in a student exchange program; there she learned to play the shamisen. In 1975, she returned to Japan for a year to research the geisha community, as part of her anthropology fieldwork. Dalby's research, done as part of her Ph.D studies at Stanford University, was presented in her dissertation, and became the basis for her first book, Geisha, about the culture of the geisha community. Her study, which included interviews with more than 100 geisha, was considered to be excellent and received praise from scholars at the time of publication, although some retrospective scholarship is more critical. During her Ph.D studies about the geisha community, conducted in , she was invited to join a house in Kyoto where she was allowed to attend banquets under the name Ichigiku—in part because she was fluent in Japanese and skilled with the shamisen. She performed at ozashiki without charging money, and, from the experience, formed friendships and relationships with geisha in the district.
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