The Bridegroom Was a Dog

August 31, 1998
In the title story of this surreal comic trilogy, which won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest award for fiction, in 1993, an eccentric young schoolteacher becomes the protagonist of a fable she tells her students about a young princess who weds a dog. Strange as the teacher is (she raises eyebrows in town by telling her students to wipe themselves, on the toilet, with snotty Kleenex), her life takes a stranger turn when Taro, a lover of unnervingly canine proclivities, moves in with her. As his animalism begins to threaten her place in the community, the pair parts ways--he to the wild, she to a better life. In "Missing Helas," Tawada tracks a mail-order bride's efforts to blend into a new culture. At times perceptive, the story veers into heavy-handed symbolism when this husband turns out to be another member of the animal kingdom. "The Gotthard Railway" rationalizes Tawada's flights of fancy by putting them in the mouth of a realistic narrator--a free-associating Japanese woman on the train through St. Gotthard, in the Swiss Alps. Although Tawada's conceits may sometimes bewilder American readers, her bizarrerie is charming and unforced: her English-language debut is authentically, if not always fruitfully, weird.