Geisha

Here is the first inside portrait of Japan's most exotic and mysterious culture, the disciplined, glamorous profession of the geisha. Liza Dalby, a young American anthropologist fluent in Japanese, is the only non-Japanese ever to have been invited to train as a geisha. This is her spellbinding account of the daily lives of these women who serve as curators of tradition, practioners of the classical arts, unmarried companions to the Japanese male elite--and are, surprisingly, the most modern and liberated women in Japan. GEISHA not only demystifies the paradox of the geisha world, it shows how it reflects the complexities of Japanese culture today, and why this two-hundred-year-old tradition is the most Japanese of all existing institutions. -- Provided by publisher.