Published with a new preface, this bestseller offers an intimate glimpse into a unique female community. Liz Dalby, the only non-Japanese woman ever to have trained as a geisha, reveals the realities of geisha life.

Written from the authors perspective as an anthropologist and gardener, this work presents essays that explore how the Asian calendar has grounded her awareness of time and place. The essays also delve into memories of keeping a pet butterfly, roasting rice cakes with her children, watching whales, and pampering worms to make compost.

A collection of essays which takes the 72 seasonal units of an ancient Chinese almanac as seeds, and grows them into a year's journal, entwining personal experience and ruminations on the cultural aesthetics of China, Japan, and California. This work explores how the Asian calendar has grounded the author's awareness of time and place.

Arguably the world's first novelist, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji in the 11th century. Liza Dalby's novel is based on existing fragments of Murasaki's diary and poems and is a fictional account of Japan's most famous female writer.

This work traces the history of the Kimono - its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance - and in doing so explores the world of the geisha, last wearers of the kimono.