Liza Crihfield Dalby Libri

Writing in luminous prose, Liza Dalby, acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki, brings us this elegant and unique year’s journal— a brilliant mosaic that is at once a candid memoir, a gardener’s diary, and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west. Structured according to the seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac, East Wind Melts the Ice is made up of 72 short chapters that can be read straight through or dipped into at random. In the essays, Dalby transports us from her Berkeley garden to the streets of Kyoto, to Imperial China, to the sea cliffs of Northern California, and to points beyond. Throughout these journeys, Dalby weaves her memories of living in Japan and becoming the first and only non-Japanese geisha, her observations on the recurring phenomena of the natural world, and meditations on the cultural aesthetics of Japan, China, and California. She illuminates everyday life as well, in stories 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, this vibrant work comprises 72 windows on a life lived between cultures, and the result is a wonderfully engaging read.

The most famous work of Japanese literature is the eleventh-century Tale of Genji by a woman of the imperial court. Out of the life and work of Murasaki Shikibu, arguably the world's first novelist, Liza Dalby has woven a delicate and irresistible fiction. She evokes Murasaki's close family, the men and women she loved, the vortex of high politics she was drawn into at court, the way in which Murasaki came to write her masterpiece, and above all the relationship to her own fictional creation, the Shining Prince Genji. Piecing together existing fragments of diary and poems, Dalby frames Murasaki's words and images in a gorgeous work of literary archaeology, where the subtle reconstruction blends with eleventh-century sensibilities, manners, fashions and preoccupations, and includes the imaginary lost final chapter of Murasaki's magnum opus. The result is a vivid portrait of the woman and the times that were the most splendid in Japanese history. The Tale of Murasaki has that rare ability to transport the reader to a different place and another time, to create an exotic world where we can identify completely with the eleventh-century heroine.

According to Buddhist theology, the world is suffering through a final corrupt era called mappo. As mappo continues, chaos will increase until the center can no longer hold. Then the world will end. Hundreds of temples in Japan are known to keep mysterious "hidden buddhas" secreted away except on rare designated viewing days. These statues are not hidden because they are powerful - their power lies in their being hidden. Are they being protected, or are they protecting the world? In this novel, one Buddhist priest struggles with the dictates of his inherited orthodoxy, while another rebels. An American graduate student begins to suspect the mysterious purpose of the hidden buddhas, just as he falls in love with a beautiful Japanese artist who is haunted by an aborted child. The weaving of karma that brings these two together results in a tech-savvy half-Western, half-Japanese child who text-messages her way through the profane world to enlightenment. Tracing the lives of its characters through the late twentieth century to the present, from Paris to Kyoto to California, Hidden Buddhas turns a cosmopolitan eye on discipline and decadence in religion, fashion, politics, and modern life.