Dalby adresses the paradox that the women considered the most servile in Japan are also those with the most freedom, and by the time the book is finished it's no longer a paradox, really. The end result is compulsively readable, half-journal and half-explication, of the widely misunderstood world of geisha and the cultural context to which it belongs- as important to an understanding of what geisha are as a study of the women themselves. Dalby, an anthropologist by nature as well as trade, has a knack for being able to translate emotion into recognizable speech and get it all down on paper in an easy-to-understand form. The show's material came, for the most part, from the first four chapters of the book, which cover a good deal of history, and ignored the rest, which is more of a personal accounting of Dalby's time in Kyoto and her research in Tokyo and some of the smaller towns.ĭalby's account is straightforward and precise, though I don't want to give the impression there's nothing here that would give the reader a sense of personal experience far from it. Of course, it's now a full week after A&E aired _The Secret Life of Geisha_, a show nominally based on Dalby's 1983 account of her time in Kyoto as the only non-Japanese ever to train and serve as a geisha. Something of a Buddhist Da Vinci Code, Hidden Buddhas travels through time to expose a mystery you will never forget." Hidden Buddhas: A Novel of Karma and Chaos explores the karmic connections between Japanese fashion, pilgrimage, dying honeybees, bad girls with cell phones, murder by blowfish, and the Buddhist apocalypse. Are they being protected, or are they protecting the world?įrom these ancient notions of doom and rebirth comes a startling new novel by the acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki. Hundreds of temples in Japan are known to keep mysterious hidden buddhas secreted away except on rare designated viewing days.
Many in Japan believe that after the world ends, the Buddha of the Future will appear and bring about a new age of enlightenment. Besides taking us on a journey through little-known corners of Japan, it offers us an engaging and believable portrait of people driven to do things they may not have imagined." -Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a GeishaĪccording to esoteric Buddhist theology, the world is suffering through a final corrupt era. With its fascinating story of characters caught up in a world they themselves don't understand, Hidden Buddhas may well be Liza Dalby's best work yet.
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