"Strangely, Taro wasn't attracted to breasts, he never so much as caressed Mitsuko's, nor was he interested in kissing her; he just loved sucking and liked to latch onto her neck like another vampire, so it was full of reddish-purple, donut-shaped marks, which she hid in the middle of summer by wrapping an Indian cotton scarf around her neck, so that she would sweat even more, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, she found that she was all swollen and red in the head, that her nose was round and her lips cracked, and she had never seen herself so ugly before and came to think that it was actually Taro's fault, which puzzled her, but maybe you got ugly if someone was really into you, and unlike other people, Taro had never ever looked at her coldly and appraisingly, and while that gave her some confidence, he never gave her time to get network its face because he kept throwing himself at her."

The Groom Was a Dog is a curious, sometimes elaborate, but also remarkably familiar story about being different or not wanting to conform to conventions. Tawada has written the story as an old, Japanese folk tale that traces back to a time when there were plenty of stories about people – both men and women – who lived together with animals. Today, you almost only come across fairy tales where men live together with animals – a crane, a fox, a fish or perhaps a mussel. Tawada wanted to change that with this story, described by the New York Times as: "This masterpiece"

Yoko Tawada [1960] is one of the most widely read and most translated Japanese authors. In recent years, she has figured among the serious candidates for the Nobel Prize, and her works have won countless prizes. The Groom Was a Dog won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 1993.