Bridegroom Was A Dog

In these three narratives, an ingenious story-teller has created a new kind of fantasy, playful yet vaguely sinister, laced with her own brand of humor, which reviewers have labeled variously as "funky," "mischievous," "weird," and "hilarious."

The author was in her early thirties when the title story won her country's highest literary award. In The Bridegroom Was a Dog, an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean; only to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like man with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy. When rumor-mongering housewives try to force them into a more respectable relationship, both escape into new relationships of their own...

With its publication here, alongside two other equally offbeat but plausible fantasies, readers in the West can now discover for themselves a writer whose inventions are as strange and exhilarating as the best of dreams.

"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

YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960 and educated at Waseda University, and now lives in Germany. She made her debut as a writer with "Missing Heels," which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991. In 1993 she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize-Japan's equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer-for "The Bridegroom Was a Dog." And in 1996 she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award to foreign writers recognized for their contribution to German culture. She has also been given the Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg (1990) and the Lessing Prize (1994).

Her fiction and poetry have been featured in journals and anthologies in France, Holland, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, but the present collection is the first to appear in English. This has since been followed by Where Europe Begins (New Directions, 2002).

The Translator: MARGARET MITSUTANI has a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from Tokyo University and now teaches at Kyoritsu Women's University in Tokyo. Her previous translations include Kenzaburo Oe's novel An Echo of Heaven and several short stories by Kyoko Hayashi.