A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog, from the incomparable National Book Award-winning Yoko Tawada Masterfully turning the rules of folklore and fable on their head, The Bridegroom Was a Dog i s 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. "“Her masterpiece”" ― The New York Times "“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 Thie "“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 "“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 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 .   Margaret Mitsutani  has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s  Scattered All Over the Earth  and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada’s  The Emissary . She also translates Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.