Product Description

A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style to an energetically modern worldscape. Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories. Robert De Niro's child, conceived in a Laundromat, masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men's hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of German cartographer. Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities -- New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires -- that grow in to a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere. Dasgupta's writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196353 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Guardian Unlimited
‘Rana Dasgupta's debut novel, Tokyo Cancelled, stands out from the crowd.’

TLS
‘Thirteen stories ... marvels of fabulation, visions and voices, rich in startling insights.’

Scotsman
‘This is a very bold, very striking book ... an unforgettable book, with its own peculiar charms.’

Customer Reviews

Unlucky thirteen
Tokyo Cancelled is a collection of short stories told by air travellers stranded overnight at an un-named airport en route to the Japanese capital. We are told nothing about the travellers telling the tales.

I would be lying if I said I enjoyed this book. The author certainly has a vivid imagination and a gentle and often charming way with his prose but a lot of the stories left a bad taste and were just plain weird or "wrong" even. There is the deformed dwarf who sleeps with his beautiful sister, the dressmaker who changes tack to partake in hardcore S&M, the businessman who escapes from his wife to a flat with a sex doll of his own creation and more. These stories are not erotic, sometimes just plain depressing and often inaccessible. I say this as a broad minded and experienced reader. The author is no stranger to an unhappy ending and I was left with the impression he was an only child who spent a lot of his early years being unkind to small animals.

This is not to say there are not good points. I enjoyed the story of Robert de Niro's lovechild who on finding the Willy Wonka style golden ticket in a box of Oreo's, won ten cookies that could turn his girlfriend into an upmarket department store for the day. This was imaginative and amusing, rare humour amongst a lot of darkness. This was a gem as were the two shortest stories, The Speed Bump and The Flyover. I also enjoyed The Changeling, the non-human being who was "outed" during a Parisian small pox epidemic. However, The Dream Recycler and Memory Maker were quite clever (maybe too clever) but similar and mostly confusing. Fans of Iain M Banks may get more out of those than me.

I would have liked to know more about the storytellers and how they came across their tales but as mentioned, we are clueless as to who said what. There is scant dialogue between the stories so the whole "Tokyo Cancelled" thing was a bit of a red herring and disappointing for me as it could have added to the book overall. A modern Canterbury Tales it ain't.

I like the occasional flutter but I would be unlikely to gamble on another Dasgupta book.

'Fairy'tales for the twenty first century
Tokyo Cancelled is an amazing, haunting book.

For one, it would be inaccurate to call it a novel. Tokyo Cancelled most definitely is not a novel - it is cycle of stories, in the tradition of the Canterbury Tales, except that the stories aren't set in medieval England, but most definitely in the mega-cities of the twenty first century. Delhi, Lagos, Tokyo Buenos Aires, New York... It is a compelling narrative strategy, and had me hooked. (Also the breaks between stories are definitive, which allows you to get some work done while reading, as there is some, albeit uneasy, sense of closure. a definite advantage over the page turning thriller..)

And the stories themselves - they are fabulously rich in detail and verve and colour, and fantastical in their imagination, and description of the world. But the stories remind you not so much of the magic realism of Rushdie, but of the foreboding 'fairytales' of the Brothers Grimm. There is a definite evocation of the language and tropes and characters of fairytales, foundlings and changelings and princesses locked in towers, legends and folklore, so abandoned in the contemporary world . (My favourite story, that of Robert de Niro's illegitimate son driving a Taxi in New York, has at its core a South Indian foktale about a girl could who could transform into a tree.) But these are not just fairytales, or rather are fairytales in the truest, undiluted sense of the term - for they haunt you with their strangeness long after you have finished reading them, making you think about the city/cities you have lived in - and realising that like sanitised fairytales, our cities are actually dark, magical and fantastical in their everydayness, and that they have connections to the larger world which we can't quite fathom...

fairytales for the twenty first century, which make you think about the 'real' cities you inhabit. A rare feat, and a refeshingly new and different way of thinking, and writing the world.

Overblown
Rana Dasgupta's first book is a collection of stories, very loosely held together by the conceit that they are being told by a group of passengers stranded for the night in a Tokyo airport. Dasgupta says the concept was inspired by The Cantebury Tales (the comparison is somewhat stretched) and this gives an idea of the level of his ambition.
Unfortunately, he is often over-ambitious, to the point of over-stretching himself. A warning sign comes on p. 1 when the word 'eschatalogical' is used in a context that indicates the author does not know what it means. Capital letters are inserted, apparently at random, (eg: "People were Taking Stock." p. 4) with no obvious function other than to convey to the reader that Dasgupta wishes to push the boundaries of form -- but to what end?
Things do pick up, and some of the stories are reasonably good yarns. But on the whole I felt that the stories themselves, like the writing style, were frequently overblown. They are self-contained sketches that try to convey a profound idea in the space of 20 or 30 pages. That's not easy, and Dasgupta simply is not up to the task. That is not to say that his writing is bad, and he may produce good fiction in the future, but with this first effort I feel he has overshot.