I went to Kyushu where nobody spoke English, so learning the language was a matter of social survival. So I was basically a blank slate when I arrived. I tried to study Japanese before I went, but growing up in Indiana, there wasn’t much Japanese to learn there.

I knew nothing of Japan except what I had learned from reading Genji and my father’s previous business trips. Coincidentally, the next year, I had a chance to go abroad to Japan. Reading Genji was my first experience with how powerful a great piece of literature can be. My father gave me Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji when I was 16.

Where did your initial interest in Japan come from? As a companion to the book, check out Dalby’s extensive website by clicking here. In The Tale of Murasaki, Dalby weaves together fact and fiction to create a vibrant, delightful, entertaining read. Now almost a millenium later, Liza Dalby, previously most noted for being the only Westerner to become a geisha, brings the world’s first novelist vividly to life in The Tale of Murasaki.Ĭalling it “literary archaeology,” Dalby, an anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture, meticulously gathered Murasaki’s extant writings, including what is left of her diaries and poems. Six hundred years before the Western world saw its first novel, Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s brilliant tome, The Tale of Genji, was a major hit in the royal courts of 11th-century Heian Japan. Court Intrigue: An interview with Liza Dalby about her new book, The Tale of Murasaki

The tale of murasaki by liza dalby