The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada

One August day soon after school had let out for the summer, a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight came calling at the Kitamura School with an old-fashioned leather suitcase but not a trace of sweat on him despite the hot sun beating down from above, and although he didn't look like a friend of Mitsuko's, with his closely cropped hair, immaculate white shirt, neatly creased trousers and polished white shoes, he seemed to know all about her house, for he walked straight into the garden through the gap in the fence, and when he saw Mitsuko repairing her mountain bike, half-naked, her hair disheveled, he went right up to her and said:

"I'm here to stay."

A Japanese schoolteacher tells her pre-teen students an inappropriate fable, about a princess whose bottom is licked clean by a dog every time she uses the bathroom. The story has several possible endings, but in one, the dog disappears at the same time a mysterious stranger appears to woo the princess. A few days later, the schoolteacher, Mitsuko Kitamura, is approached outsider her house by a man calling himself Taro, and who insists he's come to stay. Mitsuko barely has time to say anything before he's got her clothes off and his large, wet tongue up her ass.

Like the bridegroom in the fable, Taro is very doglike: he humps and licks Mitsuko, but has no interest in her appearance--or her breasts--he sleeps all day and then is gone for most of the evening; he sleeps in a patch of sunlight in the yard and is agitated by cats. Taro allows Mitsuko to indulge in her most transgressive impulses, of which she has many; she's always talking to her students, for example, about poop, or exposing her breasts to them. Taro's doglikeness is, like Mitsuko's inappropriateness, a rejection of polite social norms. Mitsuko's strange new suitor is the subject of town gossip, but the mothers of her students barely know how to express what it is that seems to be going on in her household, and without the understanding or language to talk about it, they sort of gloss over it, until someone notices that Taro looks a lot like the missing husband of another neighbor.

Taro, the woman explains, was once a sensitive and anxious man, one who was especially sensitive to harsh smells, until one day he was attacked by a strange pack of dogs, changing his personality completely. Dog-Taro seems especially attracted to Mitsuko's smell, in that dog-like way, and this attraction allows Mitsuko to begin to smell and appreciate herself. Tawada's short novella is very physical and earthy; to find release from social norms is to return to the smelly, shitting, sex-having body. In the end, Taro runs off with another man, like a dog that finds a house with better food--it's heavily implied that he and the other man are having a sexual affair as vigorous as his with Mitsuko--and Mitsuko replaces him with the other man's daughter, an awkward girl in need of a parental figure.

I'd never heard of Tawada until Brent sent me this book, but she's got a new book out this year and I feel like I'm hearing more about her. The style of The Bridegroom Was a Dog is, assuming the translator has been faithful, something unique, with its physical language and its long sentences that chug along like tiny trains. It's a strange little book, and though I don't think it will stay with me very long, it did make me interested in reading her newer, longer book.