The Bridegroom Was a Dog

About

A schoolteacher tells her class a fairy tale about a princess who marries a dog. That night, a strange, doglike man appears and begins courting her. Her friends are horrified. She is not. The romance that follows is tender, unsettling, and completely sincere — which is what makes it so disturbing. Yoko Tawada's Akutagawa Prize-winning novella blurs the boundary between fable and reality until neither category holds. The dog-bridegroom is neither metaphor nor hallucination but something Tawada refuses to explain, trusting the strangeness to do its own work. A love story that operates by fairy-tale logic in a realistic world — and dares the reader to decide which set of rules applies.