Pearls series

Her masterpiece.
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog

Included in the Dogs bundle Get the Bundle

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s most famous work. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from _The New Yorker, _ which praised it as a “fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka.”

The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a doglike man. A romantic — and sexual — courtship develops, much to the chagrin of her friends, who have suspicions about the man’s identity.

Buy from:

Paperback (published November 7, 2012)

ISBN
9780811220378
Price US
10.95
Price CN
11.99
Page Count
60

Ebook (published November 7, 2012)

ISBN
9780811220606
Price US
10.95

Yoko Tawada

Contemporary Japanese-German prose writer

Her masterpiece.
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Masterly.
The New York Times
Like putting a sensor on [Tawada’s] dream-brain and putting the other sensor on your own brain.
—Aimee Bender
Brilliant shimmering strangeness.
—Rivka Galchen
In Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own.
—Rivka Galchen