Yoko Tawada - The Bridegroom Was a Dog and other works (7 books)

YOKO TAWADA (b. 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin. She writes in both Japanese and German, publishing several books in both languages, and has won numerous literary awards.

Tawada's body of work is personal, surreal and unsurpassingly strange. It is utterly original. Often one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one's own. She returns again and again to questions of language and culture, the link between national and personal identity. If the languages we speak help define us, what happens to the identity of persons displaced between cultures? "The interesting," she once said in an interview, "lies in the in-between." And so her characters are constantly in motion, journeying between countries, languages and modes of being—providing us with "travel narratives" full of glimpses into the interstices of the world in which the structure of all experience is revealed.

THE BRIDEGROOM WAS A DOG (1993) is perhaps her most famous, and bizarre, work. Its initial publication in English was praised it as a "fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka" (The New Yorker). It 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.

The three stories in FACING THE BRIDGE float between cultures, identities, and the dreamwork of the imagination, and obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift in a never-ending balance. THE NAKED EYE (2004) is a suspenseful tale of abduction, obsession, and lost identity that follows a precocious Vietnamese girl who was kidnapped at a young age while in Germany for a youth conference. MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR (2011) features three interlocking short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective of three generations of captive polar bears.

WHERE EUROPE BEGINS (2013) presents a collection of startling new stories that move through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, blurring divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement—of a being in-between—both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story. Her most recent novel, THE EMISSARY (2014), is a near-future dystopian story of a great-grandfather who grows stronger while his great-grandson grows weaker and a lighthearted meditation on mortality.


The following books are in ePUB format:

* Bridegroom Was a Dog, The (New Directions, 2012). Margaret Mitsutani, trans.
* Emissary, The (New Directions, 2018). Margaret Mitsutani, trans.
* Facing the Bridge (New Directions, 2007). Margaret Mitsutani, trans.
* Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016). Susan Bernofsky, trans.
* Naked Eye, The (New Directions, 2009). Susan Bernofsky, trans.
* Portrait of a Tongue (Ottawa, 2013). Chantal Wright, trans.
* Where Europe Begins (New Directions, 2013). Susan Bernofsky & Yumi Selden, trans.

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