In these three stories, an ingenious Asian writer has created a new kind of fantasy, playful yet vaguely sinister, laced with her own brand of humor: a blend of the earthiness of certain fairy tales and the absurdity of much of real life. In "The Bridegroom Was a Dog," an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean, only to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like young man named Taro with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy. When rumor-mongering housewives try to force them into a more respectable relationship, both she and Taro escape into new relationships of their own. The heroine of "Missing Heels" is a mail-order bride who crosses an invisible border into a strange land where her husband's identity remains a mystery. Her encounters with people suspicious of her and intent on improving her, including a doctor who wants to reconstruct her feet, provide a wickedly funny view of an "advanced" society's attitude toward outsiders. The narrator of "The Gotthard Railway," originally written in German, is a young woman who prefers the darkness of tunnels to the Italian sunshine that intellectuals like her German boyfriend long for. Her train ride through the bowels of St. Gotthard exposes us to new ways of seeing things - flags and maps, place names and the landscapes that give rise to them.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

Literature & Fiction

Tawada, Yōko

Mitsutani, Margaret

Contemporary

Kodansha Amer Inc

In these three narratives, an ingenious story-teller has created a new kind of fantasy, playful yet vaguely sinister, laced with her own brand of humor, which reviewers have labeled variously as "funky," "mischievous," "weird," and "hilarious." The author was in her early thirties when the title story won her country's highest literary award. In The Bridegroom Was a Dog, an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean; only to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like man with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy. When rumor-mongering housewives try to force them into a more respectable relationship, both escape into new relationships of their own... With its publication here, alongside two other equally offbeat but plausible fantasies, readers in the West can now discover for themselves a writer whose inventions are as strange and exhilarating as the best of dreams.

Literary

Kodansha USA

The year is 1985. Kiwako is an ordinary office worker, in love with a married man, until an unwanted abortion causes her to snap. She kidnaps her lover's six-month-old baby and runs away with her, eventually taking refuge in an all-female religious commune. Here, she attempts to raise the girl.Fifteen years later, the child, Elena, is an adult contending with the difficulties of returning to her "natural family," made up of a mother who doesn't come home, an alcoholic father, and siblings with whom she can't connect.Mitsuyo Kakuta's powerful second novel in English is a sympathetic portrait of two women brought together by tragedy, each struggling to determine her own destiny. Told in the voices of both the kidnapper and her victim, this compelling exploration of the nature of motherhood and family was a critical and popular success in Japan. Now, Margaret Mitsutani's top-notch translation will enable an even greater number of readers to enjoy the work of one of today's outstanding writers.

The Eighth Day

KAKUTA, Mitsuyo

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Books by Mitsutani, Margaret