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Rating: 
Summary: Pure Beauty
Review: "The Tale of Murasaki" is an amazing book, it is intriguing, spell-binding and contains an athmosphere of 11th Century Japan so believable that you will find yourself completely absorbed by it. Liza Crihfield Dalby has managed to weave in Murasaki's poetry with the story in the most beautiful way, and make it all make sense. Murasaki comes to life in this diary style book, and by the time you reach the end of it, it feels as if you know her [Murasaki] personally. The book contains so much "cultural knowledge", that it gives you an insight to 11th Century Japanese religious beliefs and ceremonies, social structure, imperial court life, clothing, rural as well as urban life, social life... If you liked Geisha, by the same author, or The Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, this is the book for you. But I also recommend this book to anyone with an interest for Japanese culture, history and/or poetry. This book is pure beauty.
Rating:
Summary: Finally the Real Thing
Review: At long last, a gorgeously written book that you can trust to give you a living sense of being inside the head of a fascinating Japanese female character. Lady Murasaki was a real court lady in 11th century Japan, credited with writing the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji. From the beginning when she is a young girl in her father's house, hoping for an invitation to serve a court and making ups tories about it, we are seeing through her eyes an amazing world. Everything about it is fundamentally different from ours--the architecture that reflects and shapes social life; the eleborate rituals that stem from a naive animism; the clothing, every detail of which has significance; the skill required of every courtier to communicate in on-the-spot elegant poetry. But especially seductive is Murasaki's emotional life. The feelings are universal: desire, love, ambition, hostility, motherhood, pride--but the way they must be expressed and the significance accorded them in Japanese society are amazingly different. Through Dalby's skill at bringing up just the right psychological cues from beneath the stylized social surface, we fall in with Murasaki's point of view, her sense of time, her endurance of loss, her choices in times of crisis and despair. Her lovers, both male and female, her revered father, her worthless brother, and beloved daughter are as distinct and real as she. This book could only have been written by a woman who is also a scholar with an intimate knowledge of things Japanese, a mother, and an artist. Dalby has brought all these sensibilities together in a masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: A peek into the past
Review: This novel about Lady Murasaki and her world is a well-written story providing both a glimpse of Heian court life as well as the role of a female in said society. The focus on the aesthetic pleasures of life shows the sensitivity of this culture of the past, though at times the frivolity of the lavish lifestyle of the ruling class seems excessive to the modern mind. At the outset Murasaki is likeable because she displays a sense of individuality, intellectualism, a hint of stubbornness, and rebellion against the role of subserviant, compliant female; her somewhat taboo relationship with the Chinese visitor Ming Gwok reveals an uncompromising element to her personality as she pursues that to which her own interests guide her, versus bowing to the strictures of her society (though she is aided by the fact that her fairly enlightened father looks the other way). She also fights the societal insistence of marriage for much longer than most women would have had the staying power to do.
As the book progresses it becomes somewhat frustrating to see her buckle to fit the role of court lady, though this is likely a historically accurate portrayal of what would have become of her at the time. Because of this, the latter part of the book seems somewhat vapid at times and loses its sense of substance, even if it is accurate. Still, this is a worthwhile read from Liza Dalby, a tried and true scholar and analyzer of Japanese culture.
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