Tokyo Cancelled
A storm grounds their flight to Tokyo, and thirteen strangers are stranded overnight at an airport. The travelers huddle togeteher, and decide to spend the night telling each other stories. And so begins Rana Dasgupta’s first book, Tokyo Cancelled, where thirteen stories about lives in transit are told and linked together. This schemeis not exactly novel, being borrowed from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But Rana does more than give the classic format a modern flavor. He weaves his own post modern stories about lives uprooted, in transit, dislocated people.
All the stories are told ina aflavor best suited for their ethnicity and location. All the cities covered in the tales are modern, contemporary cosmopolitans and Rana views them through a dystopian eye and inserts his views on consumerism and present day commercialization in a sometimes witty and sometimes poignant manner.
A Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; Robert De Niro’s son masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a man who manipulates other people’s memories has to confront his own past; a Japanese entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left alone in the house of a German man who is mapping the world.
The stories are largely fantasies told with huge dollops of didactic undertones and satire. They work sometimes, and not very often, fall flat. It is an experimantal project that fails to innovate, yet the stories linger. The project as a whole leaves an exotic flavor with you.
While I can not recommend this book to everyone, I personally liked a lot in the book; I look forward to Rana’s next outing, where he hopefully delivers a more uniform and decisive stroke.
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