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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.
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.
