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    Tokyo Cancelled
    Tokyo Cancelled
    Tokyo Cancelled
    Ebook470 pages8 hours

    Tokyo Cancelled

    By Rana Dasgupta

    3/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Thirteen strangers stranded in an Asian airport spin tales that “outdo Arabian Nights for inventiveness” in this debut novel (The Guardian).
     
    Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they huddle by the baggage carousels and tell each other stories. So begins Tokyo Cancelled, a unique literary adventure that combines a modern landscape with a timeless, fairy-tale ethos. In his delightful debut, Dasgupta brings to life a cast of extraordinary individuals—some lost, some confused, some happy—in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, and wonderful.
     
    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 everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl has a strange encounter with a German man who is mapping the world.
     
    Told by people on a journey, these stories “tackle themes of transit, dislocation and uprootedness” in a “sprawling, experimental project achieves an exotic luster” (Publishers Weekly).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802199706
    Tokyo Cancelled
    Author

    Rana Dasgupta

    RANA DASGUPTA won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury, England, in 1971, he now lives in Delhi.

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    Reviews for Tokyo Cancelled

    3/5

    66 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliant, lush and thoroughly readable. I hate to say 'I was transported' but I was, I was transported. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      A terrific book, but there are some stories that just did not make sense. Still as it is in small tales, it is easy to dip into and out of.
    • 3/5
      Basically a bunch of unrelated short stories, of which I enjoyed perhaps half, tolerated the rest, except for one- which I could not read. Though billed as a modern Canterbury Tales, it is not. The storytellers have no place in their stories - if it weren't for the brief prologue (which I must say was written in an entertaining stream-of-consciousness style) there would be no indication at all that this was anything other than a book of short stories. If we had learned something about the tellers of the tales, or if they had shared their feelings about the stories they told this book might have hit the mark. As is, however, I was unimpressed overall.
    • 2/5
      As this book starts, a snowstorm has blanketed Tokyo, leaving a planeload of passengers stranded in a small airport. Gradually, hotel rooms are found for all but 13 of them. In order to while away the night, they decide that each of them will tell a story.I thought this was a great premise - although it was disappointing then that the stories were all so similar in tone and theme. These are fables for a globalised world - and that's not a lazy cliche in this case, for the subject matter of the stories is, in many ways, globalisation itself - the increased ease and speed with which people, information and commodities can travel across borders, and the vast gaps of income and opportunity which result. Into this environment are dropped the traditional characters of myth - the third son, the mysterious prophecy, the encounter between a wealthy man and a shopkeeper.The stories are tremendously imaginative, and there are some images which will stay with the reader - I liked the cyber-map which visualised all the routes which are travelled by people, commodities and information. But I wish the author had applied the same level of imagination to the way that people might actually behave in some of these circumstances. Also, blending a naturalistic modern environment with fabulous events turns out to be quite tricky - I am quite a fan of fantasy and magical realism, but they still have to make sense on their own terms, and for me that wasn't happening here. So, I can accept that one character is a mute woman who can make people hear her thoughts. I can't really accept that a wealthy man would send his new wife to work cleaning in a hotel, especially not a hotel which is connected to the sinister source of his wealth. The final problem for me was that many of the stories didn't really seem to go anywhere. It was as if the author had the idea but felt it was enough just to put it down on paper.I think the stories are similar enough that you would know, after a couple, whether or not this is a book that you would enjoy.Sample sentence: The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes.Recommended for: I would recommend this for fans of thought-provoking sci-fi - it's got the interesting ideas, but also some of the downsides that sci-fi sometimes has (clunky writing and plausibility gaps).
    • 1/5
      DNF - Finally had to admit defeat around 80% through, I just can't deal with magical realism. Interesting concept for a book and the initial few stories were fine, but I found the majority of the book painful to read.
    • 1/5
      Having loved Rana Dashgupta’s second novel, Solo, I was keen to read this, his first, which seems to have attracted a host of glowing reviews which is puzzling because I was sorely disappointed. Tokyo Cancelled isn’t really a novel at all, just a collection of dreary short stories with nothing to link them and nothing at all to recommend them, either.The hook the author hangs it all on is that a plane has been cancelled – the passengers, stranded in a closed and darkened airport, tell each other stories to pass the time with shades of the Canterbury Tales , except that most of the stories told are not 'contemparary' to the teller's lives, more like a series of pointless fairy tales that aren't linked in any way; each stands alone with no accompanying passages to tell us about the person telling the tale or why they’re telling it. It all comes across as pretentious and contrived, the stories are just boring and the voices – when we hear them - unconvincing; real people don’t talk like this.Tedious in the extreme.

    Book preview

    Tokyo Cancelled - Rana Dasgupta

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