Liza Crihfield Dalby

Discusses the geisha--practioners of music and dance and unmarried companions to the Japanese male elite.

Geisha

Murasaki Shikibu, the real-life author of "The Tale of Genji," uses her imagination and storytelling abilities to escape from loneliness, and later to entertain the empress and express the political and sexual intrigue she has experienced.

A Novel

The Tale of Murasaki

"The colourful and stylised kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses not only Japanese fashion and design taste but also reveals something of the soul of Japan, and is seen by many as a symbol for all that is Japanese simplicity, elegance and beauty. Amazingly beautiful, the kimono has gone through many changes in the centuries since it was first imported from China, changes that reflect the way that Japanese society has also developed over the ages."

Fashioning Culture

Kimono

The author, an American anthropologist, describes her experiences during the year she spent as a Japanese geisha, and looks at the role of women, and geishas, in modern Japan

Paul van Riel

Presents color photographs of the kimono that illustrate how it is designed, the historical and cultural significance of the garment, the individuals who wear it, and the types of accessories worn with it.

The Catalogue of Everything Japanese

All-Japan

Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton

Kazue Edamatsu Campbell

Mark Oshima

This volume is the first comprehensive study of the women of the pleasure quarters and entertainment districts of Japan of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. It examines the cultural and metaphorical meanings of courtesans and geisha and their appearance in art and Kabuki theater. These women were at the nexus of social relations, part of public culture, organized into institutions and transformed into emblems of femininity, personifications of the romantic ideal. The Women of the Pleasure Quarter reproduces paintings and woodblock prints by forty-six artists, virtually all the leading masters of the genre, including Miyagawa Choshun, Ando Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, and Kitagawa Utamaro. These works, the most familiar forms of Japanese art to Westerners, are important both for their intrinsic aesthetic quality and for their value as documents of Japanese cultural history. Art and life were fundamentally intertwined in the floating world; it was a realm in which art not only influenced life but in which popular entertainment also transformed itself into art by inventing its own conventions and artistic forms. The Women of the Pleasure Quarter is published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, and also seen at Equitable Gallery, New York, and Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Every work in the exhibition, including several rare hand-colored photographs, is reproduced in full color and discussed in an individual commentary. Capsule biographies of each artist, a glossary, and a selected bibliography complete this enchanting survey of one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in art history.

Japanese Paintings and Prints of the Floating World

The Women of the Pleasure Quarter

Povestea doamnei Murasaki

Asterisk* (Amsterdam)

Louw Dijkstra

Een Amerikaanse antropologe laat zich inwijden in het leven van een geisha in Kyoto halverwege de jaren zeventig.

Liza Crihfield Dalby

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