Tokyo Cancelled

Tokyo Cancelled is Rana Dasgupta's debut novel, published in 2005, and revolves around thirteen different passengers stranded in an airport, each telling a separate tale to pass the time. The novel, considered a work of the magic realist genre, or perhaps irrealism, presents short stories tenuously linked together by their use of fairy-tale like narratives, as well as an overarching theme of modern globalization. The novel was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (UK) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award (India). One tale from the book was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize.

Tokyo Cancelled can be read as a compendium of fairy-tales from the modern world, expressing the dark and irrealistic side of life in the 21st century. Unlike the idealized, moralistic endings of classic fairy-tales, the modern world cannot be so easily read.

Table of contents

The separate chapters in the novel, often broken up by comments from the airplane passengers, are as follows:

• Prologue: "Arrivals" — The flight to Tokyo is cancelled, thus the book's title, and the remaining airline passengers gather together to tell their tales.
• The First Story: "The Tailor" — Prince Ibrahim commissions a fancy robe from a poor tailor, only to dismiss him after many years. The tailor then faces many hardships to bring to Ibrahim his work, ultimately failing and becoming nothing more than a beggar. He must eventually tell a tale from his own imagination in order achieve vindication from the king.
• The Second Story: "The Memory Editor" — Thomas, a young boy in London, finds work editing memories. Strangely, he finds his own memories affected as well.
• The Third Story: "The Billionaire's Sleep" — Taking place in Delhi, this story tells of the Malhotra family's three god-like children, a tragedy that unfolds with nods to both the tale of Rapunzel and the Ramayana.
• The Fourth Story: "The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker" — Klaus, a German mapmaker, compiles all of the world's data in a unique map, but trouble comes when a strange mute named Deniz moves into his mansion.
• The Fifth Story: "The Store on Madison Avenue" — Using Oreo cookies, Robert De Niro's bastard son transmutes his girlfriend into a high-end clothing store, stirring the attention of the Chinese mob.
• The Sixth Story: "The Flyover" — Under a certain Mr. Bundu's obscure business network, based on the sales from a busy market under a flyover, Marlboro, a Nigerian resident, loses everything when the government walls up the market with him inside.
• The Seventh Story: "The Speed Bump" — A Detroit teenager loses his life after a new speed bump is installed in his neighborhood. This chapter, the only one without any magical elements, can be seen as a "speed bump" for the novel itself.
• The Eighth Story: "The Doll" — Yukio Takizawa is in the business of alternative cleaning products. Under pressure from work and from family members that don't understand him, he creates and falls in love with a life-size doll on the verge of becoming real.
• The Ninth Story: "The Rendezvous in Istanbul" — Two lovers, Natalia and Riad, have a romantic chance encounter in Istanbul. Briefly afterwards, Riad loses his voice and returns to work as a sailor. Much later, stranded at a port in Marseilles and on the brink of insanity, he births a bird from his throat that leads Natalia to his rescue.
• The Tenth Story: "The Changeling" — In Paris, a changeling (a noncorpum living in a human body) named Bernard befriends an old wanderer named Fareed. After a rare type of flower begins growing inside his body, Fareed goes to France looking for a single word to help him pass from life to death easily. Despite an outbreak of smallpox and a city under lockdown, Bernard roams around searching for this word for his friend. Eventually Fareed dies, but only after Bernard has been tethered to his soul, causing him to die and lose his immortality as well.
• The Eleventh Story: "The Bargain in the Dungeon" — Katya, the most recent addition to Magda’s ambiguous dungeon of humiliation, experiences more than she bargained for when trying to have the baby of one mysterious client named K.
• The Twelfth Story: "The Lucky Ear Cleaner" — Xiaosong, considered lucky all his life, moves his way up the ranks of the working class in Shenzhen until the fond memory of cleaning Yinfang’s ear has him give it all up.
• The Thirteenth Story: "The Recycler of Dreams" — The appropriately postmodern finale of the novel. This chapter self-referentially recalls past scenes from the other stories in the wild dream of Gustavo.
• Epilogue: "Departures" — With some sense of reluctance, the thirteen story tellers make their way onto the flight as the reality of morning returns to the airport.

The number thirteen

The number thirteen seems to carry some significance in the novel, as it is mentioned on several occasions. First of all, there are thirteen passengers left in the airport, each with their own unique tale. In "The Tailor," the elders of the king's court note that the tailor's story has all the thirteen levels of meaning. In "The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker," there is mention of thirteen dresses. Likewise, in "The Store on Madison Avenue," Chu Yu Tang has thirteen daughters. In "The Rendevouz in Istanbul," Riad bets on the number thirteen while gambling at roulette for money to convince Natalia to sleep with him. He thinks the number unlucky, bets on it for that very reason, and wins. In "The Changeling," Fareed sings thirteen songs, one for each day of his time in the garden, and then dies. In "The Recycler of Dreams," a chapter with thirteen sections, Gustavo records the dreams of his thirteen homeless boarders. The number thirteen appears elsewhere, suggesting some importance of the number to the overall understanding of the novel.