Bridegroom Was a Dog

Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani

Book cover for Bridegroom Was a Dog
Book cover for Bridegroom Was a Dog
Image for variant 9780811220378
Image for variant 9780811239967
Book cover for Bridegroom Was a Dog
Book cover for Bridegroom Was a Dog
Image for variant 9780811220378
Image for variant 9780811239967

Bridegroom Was a Dog

Bridegroom Was a Dog

Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani

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Description

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.

Critical Reviews

"Her masterpiece"-- "The New York Times"

"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."--Adam Thirlwell "London Review of Books"

"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

"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 "Irish Times"

Publishing Information

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub date: 2025-11-25
Length: 80 pages

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