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 Tawadas most famous story. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, who 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 the dog from the fable appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a dog-like man. They develop a sexual courtship with allegorical overtones much to the chagrin of the teacher’s disbelieving friends.