Liza Dalby

Liza Crihfield Dalby (born 1950) is an American anthropologist and novelist specializing in Japanese culture.

She is a 1972 graduate of Swarthmore College, receiving her Masters in 1974 and 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.

In 1975 she went to Japan on a Fulbright scholarship to research geisha for her Ph.D. thesis. Her book Geisha (filmed as American Geisha) is based on her experiences with the geisha community in Kyoto's Pontochō.

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

American "Geisha"

During 1975 and 1976 Dalby accompanied a number of the Pontocho geisha on some of their engagements in Kyoto, as they felt that Dalby's research would benefit from an insider's perspective. Dalby was fluent in Japanese and on occasion played the shamisen for guests, whilst wearing formal geisha attire.

However, despite the fact that Dalby has been referred to as the first ever western woman to become a geisha, in reality she was not a real geisha. She never went through the formal processes of becoming a geisha herself, nor was she formally associated with any of the okiya or ochaya in Kyoto. Her attendance at such parties for research purposes was only at the invitation of her geisha friends, and clients were not billed for her attendance as they would be for any real geisha who were present.

Dalby stated that she "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]

Bibliography

Geisha, University of California Press, 1983 ISBN 0-520-04742-7
Kimono: Fashioning Culture, Yale University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-300-05639-7
The Tale of Murasaki, First Anchor Books, 2000 ISBN 0-385-49795-4
East Wind Melts the Ice, University of California Press, 2007 ISBN 0-520-25053-2
Hidden Buddhas, Stone Bridge Press, 2009