The Bridegroom Was a Dog

by Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)

Overview

A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog, from the incomparable National Book Award-winning Yoko Tawada

Masterfully turning the rules of folklore and fable on their head, The Bridegroom Was a Dog is a disarming and unforgettable modern classic. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811239967
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.

 

Margaret Mitsutani has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada’s The Emissary. She also translates Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

Editorial Reviews

"“There is a matter-of-fact strangeness to [Tawada's] work that transports the reader without being escapist or overly fantastical. It is experimental writing that comes in at odd angles, peeling apart the familiar and unfamiliar... A strange and entrancing tale that shifts and surprises from paragraph to paragraph .”"

Ronan Hession

"“Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.” "

Sara Baume

"“Tawada is, far and away, one of my favourite writers working today—thrilling, discomforting, uncannily beautiful, like no one you have ever read before.” "

Laura van den Berg

"“Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.”"

Madeleine Thie

"“A precondition of Tawada’s writing is that reality and language exist in extravagantly fluid relation. In its comic sensual impossibility, this fantasia [The Bridegroom Was a Dog] makes you realize that Tawada has absorbed not just a Japanese tradition of magical narration, but a German-Jewish tradition of transformation.”"

London Review of Books - Adam Thirlwell

Tawada's fiction is an acquired taste. -- Time Out New York

Ben Greenman

Each [story] sustains a masterly balance between the tenuous but meaningful connections of dreams and the direct, earthy storytelling of folk tales. -- The New York Times Book Review

Michael Porter

"Her masterpiece."

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

"Three fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tales... [that have] the dream quality of Kafka." -New Yorker

"A series of misadventures, at once hilarious and menacing." -Village Voice

"Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency. Each one sustains a masterly balance between the tenuous but meaningful connections of dreams and the direct, earthy storytelling of fold tales." -The New York Times

"A surrealist with a funky, abrasive sense of humor." -Kirkus Reviews

"A refreshing appetite for mischief." -Los Angeles Times

"Funny and audacious." -Booklist

"As in a novel by Jules Verne, fantastic new spaces keep opening up before your inner eye." -WimWenders

From the Publisher