Yoko Tawada Goes to the Dogs: A Review of The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1998)

I found this lovely and eccentric triple-braid of novellas by the celebrated

Japanese prosateuse Yoko Tawada on my usual thrift store peregrinations, and knew
instantly this was one to keep and not to sell. It's a first edition of this work,
published (and printed) in Japan by Kodansha International press. Charming line
drawings by Ryuji Watanabe adorn the title page of each story. The cover art is
decidedly odd: above a rather minimalist abstract landscape of silvery gray cloudy
banding (an abstraction of morning fog) is a white sky...and what looks like a
Weimaraner to me is standing there in sartorial splendor, bow tie and all, licking
his chops. This is the dust jacket art. The hardcover underneath has the same
minimalist landscape, minus the anthropomorphic Weimaraner. So I guess somebody
thought that was a good marketing tactic for wherever this book was sold. This
cover art confused the kids who stock the shelves at the store, who had placed it
in the children's books (my favorite section of books anyway).

Here is the bio the book gives for the author: "Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in
1960 and educated at Waseda University, and now lives in Germany. She made her
debut as a writer with "Missing Heels," which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for New
Writers in 1991. In 1993 she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize--Japan's
equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer--for "The Bridegroom was a Dog." And in 1996
she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award to foreign writers
recognized for their contribution to German culture. She has also been given the
Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg (1990) and the Lessing Prize (1994)."

So how does this triad of novellas strike one contemporary American reader?

Well, I should state first off, the style is clearly "magical realism." The book
avoids this term, and tries to claim (predictable move) that the author has
created a new genre, or new style. The front matter states: "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." This is a fair enough
description, but the writing does not really represent a new style, or "new kind
of fantasy." The erotic components of these stories are treated with a naturalism
one has learned to expect from Japanese literature, but which might titillate
readers unfamiliar with the same.

The first and best of these stories is the title piece. The back cover of the book
has a quote which succinctly gives you the underlying fable: "Once upon a time
there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went
to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it
for her, so she used to call the princess's favorite black dog and say, 'if you
lick her bottom clean, one day she'll be your bride,' and in time the princess
herself began looking forward to that day..."

This fable is actually a story that a teacher verging on spinsterhood tells her
young charges. Miss Kitamura runs the Kitamura school, which is a sort of
preparatory or pre-school for youngsters, out of an old house she has somewhat
mysteriously acquired from a farming family. She tells the children other
questionable things, such as wiping one's bottom with kleenex that has been used
to blow one's nose is rather a delight, and the parents of these children pretend
not to notice the oddity of these pronouncements, preferring to see hidden morals
such as "the importance of thrift" in them.

One day, a man who arrives at her front door (when classes are not in session)
asks if she has received the telegram he sent her, while quickly moving her into
another room as he undresses her and then penetrates her, all in a matter of
minutes. The narrator, who seems to experience life rather as a dream anyway, goes
along with this experience completely, only occasionally questioning it. From that
moment forward these two are a couple, but quite the odd couple. The man turns out
to be the exact human embodiment of the dog in the fable, making love to her in,
to put it succinctly, "doggie-style." This doesn't just refer to a particular
position. He is in love with her smells and is often gripping her legs and nosing
towards her backside. Somehow this doesn't come off as comical so much as openly
erotic and exciting, which is how the narrator perceives her strange new lover.
This relationship awakens a whole new olfactory world for Miss Kitamura herself,
who now becomes acutely aware of other people's vicissitudinous smells and even
her own, from which she learns to intuit her own moods. She realizes, for
instance, that sleeping pills leave an odor of discontent on the user's breath.

The strange relationship between Miss Kitamura and Iinuma (she only learns his
name when she learns the secret of his hidden past from the mother of one of her
pupils) stirs up controversy in the community. The lovers rarely speak and
Iinuma's only semblance of usefulness (besides sex) seems to be his commitment to
cleaning Miss Kitamura's house in an almost obsessive compulsive manner. He is
often on the floor polishing the floorboards, presumbably on all fours like a dog.
He sleeps all day, and vanishes every night until morning, in true canine fashion.
The story takes a gay (or more properly, bisexual) turn near the end, which
precipitates major changes in the lives of four characters, including Miss
Kitamura.

It is true that this story (like all three stories) walks that fine line between
dream and reality. It is preposterous enough that it could be reality, but it has
a strange logic in the imagery that is distinctly dream-like. Tawada's stories
often eroticize passivity, yet they don't seem to be about sex so much as they are
about solipsism. The more important characters in her stories don't really seem to
believe in the world; the world is just a style these characters are somehow
projecting onto the unfolding phenomena around them called by convention a
"world," like the narrator in Bridegroom, who is amused by what she perceives to
be her own excesses, even when these include acts by others (or herself) which
seem to shock more "rational" people around her, who, in true solipsist fashion,
only exist as part of her unfolding narrative. In short, the author (and her
characters) seem to believe it beneath us, infradig, to apologize for the dream
which is our life.

The first novella is an enjoyable read, and I tried to leave some essential plot
twists out in case you should choose to read this somehow liberating work.
Memorable sentences you want to copy out somewhere for easy accessibility later do
abound in this book (respect is due to translator Margaret Mitsutani).

The second story, which won Tawada her first major literary prize, is less
satsifying in the long run, in terms of giving the reader pleasant, lingering
aftereffects, but is still a quite enjoyable read. A woman arriving in an
unspecified foreign country steps off a train and loses a heel in the process. The
imbalance this small event occasions never leaves the narrator of the story from
this point on. Perhaps this is too obvious a metaphor for entering a foreign
culture and the inevitable experiences of the unexpected (and often the
alienating) one encounters at every turn on the street.

Tawada does a clever thing. She waits quite some time before telling us that the
narrator we are following down these unknown streets is not a tourist or a
traveling businesswoman, but actually a mail-order bride seeking her new
household. When she does finally find this strange house she is to live within,
her new husband turns out to be practically a ghost, for he never shows himself to
her. She hears his retreating footsteps at times, she finds warm tea and money
laid out for her upon awakening each morning, but she never catches a glimpse of
the man except in dreams, where he changes constantly to fit various expectations
the narrator has for a husband. There is a central metaphor here involving squid,
and their ability to navigate fluently in all directions, which really takes the
tale in a classically surreal direction as it progresses. One gets the impression
that the Japanese proverb about squid which is at the heart of this tale is not
really translatable, or that it would have interrupted the tale for the translator
to have put one of those annoying footnotes in, but one senses one has missed
something because of just such a lacuna. This tale again has wonderful passages
one wants to transcribe into a notebook of memorable quotes. Here's a sample. The
bride has finally decided to discover her husband's secret, and has called a
locksmith to open the room with the black door which is forever locked: "On the
way, he asked me what my husband did, and I told him without thinking, 'He's a
novelist," at which he nodded, muttering, 'I guess guys like that spend a lot of
time shut up in their rooms.' When we stopped in front of the house, I almost lost
my nerve, realizing that, through ignorance and impatience, I could well be
ruining a perfectly normal marriage. That lingering sense of a hidden part of life
on which the curtain never rose, that hint of joy which always slipped away, out
of your grasp, until all the other odds and ends grew into a mountain, filling
your days--wasn't this waht every couple experienced? And if this was the case, I
thought, there was no reason to destroy it; but then, seized with a desire to pry
open my husband's room, grab him, and stare him in the face, whether he was a
child, an old man, or a corpse, I urged the locksmith on: 'Come on, his room's on
the second floor.'" The truth turns out to be weirder than any of those three
possibilities.

The last tale was actually written by the author in German originally, and is set
in Switzerland. "The Gotthard Railway" sort of fuses German literature with
Japanese literature and this is her most personal tale, seemingly about the
ambivalent feelings of love and fear she feels towards a German writer and friend,
probably her lover, but ostensibly about the titular mountain with the railway
running right through the heart of it, a black tunnel the author delights in
exploring.

The author makes it clear in time that she is writing an apologia for the distance
she feels towards the world and its social conventions. It is beautifully
childlike at times, and has some sublime moments, but is the least well-written of
the three stories here. It's still better than most stories one encounters in even
the best fiction magazines. It made me think of the Kurosawa segment "The Tunnel"
from his Dreams although of course there the director had other intentions...but
I'm thinking of the way he realized the archetypal nature of tunnels on film with
those atmospherics. Tunnels seem to be an archetype in Japanese literature and
film, and of course they are a part of daily life there, so it's natural that they
would enter the grain of literature.

All in all, I have no problems recommending this book to readers. If one were only
going to read one tale, it should be the first one. If only two, then the first
two.

But now I am waxing lecturesome and that means time to shut up!

Sayonara.

This review originally appeared on my blog, Joe Brainard's Pyjamas. Come visit me!
You may reproduce any of my writings anywhere as long as you credit me and/or my
blog and as long as you aren't making any money off me, you carpetbagger!