The Bridegroom Was a Dog

by Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)

Overview

Internationally acclaimed author Yoko Tawada's most famous — and bizarre — tale in a stand-alone, New Directions Pearl edition.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s most famous story. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, who praised it as, “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 dog-like man. They develop a very sexual, romantic courtship with many allegorical overtones — much to the chagrin of her friends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811220606
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/27/2012
Series:	New Directions Pearls
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	525,759
File size:	133 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as “magnificently strange.”
Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Editorial Reviews

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