Tokyo Cancelled

Front Cover
Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, Dec 1, 2007 - Fiction - 400 pages
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).

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Section 13
Section 14
Section 15
Section 16
Section 17
Section 18
Section 19
Section 20

Section 9
Section 10
Section 11
Section 12
Section 21
Section 22
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2007)

rana dasgupta grew up in Cambridge, England. He worked for a marketing consultancy in London and New York for a few years before moving to Delhi to write. He lives there still.

Bibliographic information