Liza Dalby

In this collection of essays Liza Dalby takes the 72 seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac as seeds, and grows them into a year's journal, entwining personal experience, natural phenomena, and ruminations on the cultural aesthetics of China, Japan, and California. Written from Dalby's perspective as an anthropologist and gardener, the essays explore how the Asian calendar has grounded her awareness of time and place. Drawing connections between philology and nature, memory and experience, they draw on her experiences over the years she spent in Japan where she first went to live at age 16. She also conducted fieldwork on a tiny island in the Inland sea, worked as the only non-Japanese geisha, and painted her teeth black to recreate the courtly fashions of the eleventh century. The essays also delve into memories of keeping a pet butterfly, roasting rice cakes with her children, watching whales, and pampering worms to make compost. In the manner of the Japanese personal poetic essay form, together they comprise 72 windows into a life lived between cultures, resulting in a dazzling and down-to-earth mosaic-like memoir.

Liza Dalby tenía veinticinco años cuando decidió que la mejor manera de completar su tesis sobre el mundo de las Geishas sería un viaje a Oriente, para observar muy de cerca los usos y costumbres de estas mujeres exoticas y fascinantes. Lo que quiza no sospechaba entonces es que su viaje a Japon y sus ganas de saber lo convertirian en la primera mujer extranjera que trabajaria como Geisha en Kioto. Lo que empezo siendo el objeto de un estudio academico pronto se convirtio en una experiencia inolvidable, y la mirada pretendidamente neutra tropezo con sensaciones y sentimientos nuevos.

Las extraordinarias vivencias de Murasaki, la creadora de la clásica obra La historia de Genji, en la época del mayor esplendor del imperio japonés.

El apasionante testimonio de la primera occidental que, luego de estudiar el mundo de las geishas, se convirtió en una de las más famosas de Japón.

The Tale of Murasaki is an elegant and brilliantly authentic historical novel by the author of Geisha and the only Westerner ever to have become a geisha.In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu wrote the worlds first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in the history of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poeta lonely girl who becomes such a compelling storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasakiis the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place. Whether writing about mystical rice fields in the rainy mountains or the politics and intrigue of the royal court, Dalby breathes astonishing life into ancient Japan.