As a teenager, Liza Dalby spent a year with a family in Saga, the southernmost island of Kyushu, Japan, absorbing a culture that had always fascinated her. When her host parents sent Dalby's "sister," Ryoko, for training in the precise art of the Japanese tea ceremony--a traditional instruction for marriageable young women--Dalby went along. She recalls "a soup of liquid jade rimmed with froth and presented, like a jewel, in a chunky bowl meant to be received with both hands." Their teacher's wife would whip the frothy tea, chanting "sara sara sara chin" in ritual imitation of the sounds made by the bamboo whisk.
After the sessions, Dalby and Ryoko unwound over coffee and cakes, kvetching about how their legs ached from sitting formally on the tea hut cushions. "We were quite typical in our lack of seriousness. Still, we went through the motions," Dalby, MA '74, PhD '78, wrote in her introduction to Okakura Kakuzo's The Book of Tea (Tuttle, 2000). And something sank in. "As I became familiar with the ritual, it became remarkably liberating," she wrote. "The idea that deep artistic freedom can lie within rigidly structured form is one of the most important lessons I have learned in my life."
Japanese culture became the focus of Dalby's writing. As part of her anthropology dissertation, she studied geisha, then became one herself--the first non-Japanese to do so. She says the women invited her to join them because they felt misunderstood by the West. (They are not prostitutes, Dalby says. Though some have affairs with their clients or become long-term mistresses, this is neither expected nor usual.) Dalby had a head start over most Japanese girls: she could play the shamisen, a three-stringed instrument geisha must learn, and she felt comfortable conversing with businessmen. She later extolled the disciplined geisha life in her acclaimed book, Geisha (UC Press, 1983, 1998). Dalby also is a consultant for Steven Spielberg's upcoming film Memoirs of a Geisha.
At her home in Berkeley, with its enchanting backyard garden of rocks and water, we sip mugi cha and discuss her love affair with Japan, particularly Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki is the 11th-century author of The Tale of Genji, acknowledged as the world's first novel and the fundamental work of Japanese literature; she is Japan's rough equivalent to Shakespeare. Dalby remembers reading Arthur Waley's landmark translation as a 16-year-old in her Indiana backyard gazebo over a long, hot summer. Now she has recreated Murasaki's life in her first novel.
The Tale of Murasaki (Doubleday, 2000) is a fascinating introduction to Japan's Heian dynasty, a highly aestheticized culture of incense-blending contests, poetry, calligraphy, ritual and elaborate costuming. Between their piquant observation of the seasons and demanding court ceremonies, however, time hung heavy on the women of the court. Depression, bickering, gossip and ennui were daily bread. Murasaki, a young widow who entered the court in 1006, may have written the Genji tales to amuse them--the stories are mostly about women and their predicaments, with the dashing, aristocratic seducer, the Shining Prince Genji, a convenient narrative peg. Of one thing we can be sure, Dalby says: it was a hit in 11th-century Japan. "They needed something to pass the time."
Little is known of Murasaki beyond a fragmentary diary. "A lot of Kyoto culture was erased in the subsequent two centuries," Dalby notes, largely by periodic fires that ravaged the crowded city's wood-and-paper homes. So Dalby structured her "literary archaeology" around 127 of Murasaki's 135 surviving poems, written in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern called waka, a predecessor of the shorter haiku.
Unlike most contemporary Western poetry, waka was a social medium. Aristocrats were expected to compose on the spot for special occasions or spontaneous evening repartee. Personal letters typically took this form and featured references to a "whole corpus of literature, which the reader was expected to know," Dalby explains.
A pleiad of prominent women writers shone in the Heian period, and three of the best are characters in Dalby's novel. Sei Sho-nagon, author of the famous Pillow Book, was the proud, witty and vivacious lady-in-waiting to Emperor Ichijô's first wife, Empress Teishi, and the star of a rival literary salon (Murasaki served Ichijô's second wife, Sho-shi). Murasaki's diary comments about Sho-nagon are biting--she found her conceited.
After the Empress Teishi's death, Sei Sho-nagon disappears from the court records. "The apocryphal notion is that she died in poverty, in the countryside--her comeuppance for being so snippy," says Dalby, who instead portrays the fallen writer as still lively, quick-witted, unrepentent and wholly loyal to the late empress despite poverty. "When you've fallen as far as you can go, you pick yourself up and go on," Dalby says of one of her most arresting characters.
Murasaki's diary also disparages Izumi Shikibu, the most gifted poet of the period. Compared with Murasaki's waka, Dalby says, Izumi's passionate poems are "more universal, and the language is very beautiful." But she scandalized the court with her sexual indiscretions. At some point Izumi, too, disappeared from Heian court records, leaving Dalby few clues to the end of her story.
But there was an unexpected postscript. In 1998, she visited the grave of her "geisha sister" who had perished in one of the still-commonplace Kyoto fires. As is customary, Dalby and her "geisha mother" burned incense and poured water over the stone. ("That's enough--she'll get cold!" warned the geisha mother.) Dalby almost overlooked the small, out-of-the-way, 1,000-year-old stone stupa nearby, undated but marked with a simple wooden plaque. It was the grave of Izumi Shikibu.
Why were so many women prominent in Heian arts and public life? Dalby cites several reasons. They could inherit property, and they had a great deal of sexual freedom. Moreover, even married women usually remained in their natal home, so maternal relatives had a lot of influence.
And women writers had another advantage. The written language, almost the exclusive domain of men, was Chinese, and it had calcified in Japan. "Like Latin in the Middle Ages, it was not the language you spoke, not the language you thought in," Dalby observes. So women developed a cursive Japanese script called kana to write the way they spoke, thought and felt. The flowering of female genius during the Heian era is perhaps unparalleled in history: men even took female pseudonyms to publish, so they could use a language not quite acceptable for intellectuals.
Dalby and I leave her sunken living room, with its unconventional taxidermy projects--Dalby's offbeat hobby was her answer to a brutal writer's block--and its piano strewn with sheaves of music (Dalby's husband and three kids are accomplished musicians; Dalby sticks to her shamisen). The former geisha shows me her Japanese garden with ayame (sweet flag iris), golden-orange kerria rose, and a leafless plant that Dalby promises will bear striking purple berries come autumn. The image is almost like a waka, so the name is fitting: it's the Murasaki Shikibu bush.
Cynthia Haven wrote about Robert Hass and Czeslaw Milosz in the March/April issue.
