The Bridegroom Was a Dog

A tale of passion and romance between a Japanese schoolteacher and a doglike man, from the prize-winning author of The Last Children of Tokyo

Mitsuko, a schoolteacher at the Kitamura school, inspires both rumour and curiosity in the parents of her students because of her unconventional manner - not least when she tells the children the fable of a princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog she is intimate with. And when a young man with sharp canine teeth turns up at the schoolteacher's home and declares he's 'here to stay', the romantic - and sexual - relationship that develops intrigues the community, some of whom have suspicions about the man's identity and motives.

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

Her masterpiece New York Times
Brilliant, shimmering strangeness -- Rivka Galchen
Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things -- Sara Baume
Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return -- Madeleine Thien
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
Tawada's stories are delightfully surreal and fantastical... If you liked Rachel Ingalls' Mrs Caliban or indeed Kafka's The Metamorphosis, you will enjoy this unusual, unique tale The Gloss
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

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 received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. She is the author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Last Children of Tokyo and Scattered All Over the Earth. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

MARGARET MITSUTANI is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

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