The Bridegroom Was a Dog - Tapa dura

In these three stories, an ingenious Japanese 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.