Tokyo cancelled
| Author | Rana Dasgupta |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Travel Fiction |
| Published | 2005 |
| Publisher | Fourth Estate |
Tokyo Cancelled is the debut novel by British Indian novelist Rana Dasgupta. The novel narrates the stories told by thirteen different passengers stranded in an airport, each telling a separate tale to pass the time. Tokyo Cancelled presents short stories tenuously linked together by their use of fairy-tale like narratives, with short interludes between the narratives which link the tales together. These tales, whilst having little-to-no unteraction with each other, all present the overarching themes of modern globalization and metamorphosis, as well as links into the magic realism genre.
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.
In a unidentified country, Prince Ibrahim visits a small rural town and comes across a tailor named Mustafa. Impressed with the tailor’s work, the Prince requests that Mustafa make him a fine ceremonial robe and deliver it to the royal palace. Mustafa toils over the robe for several weeks, and when his work is done he travels to the capital city. Arriving at the royal palace, Mustafa is repeatedly denied entry due to not having any documentation. Having spent all of his money getting to the capital city, and steeped in debt from the costs of his labour, he begins living on the streets outside the royal palace and buries the robe in the desert.
Many years later, Mustafa spots Prince Ibrahim and desperately tries to approach him, yet despite his protests the Prince does not recognise him in his bedraggled form. One of the Prince’s companions, Suleiman, who remembers the Prince requesting the robe, takes pity on the tailor and offers to buy the robe off Mustafa if he can bring it to him. Mustafa returns to the spot where he buried the robe but discovers that a local villager has sold it to a French museum and has used the millions of dollars it fetched to begin construction on the site.
Returning empty-handed, Suleiman doubts Mustafa’s story and turns him away with just enough money to cover his stay in the capital. Later, during a massive festival attended by various corporations, Mustafa petitions to King Saïd and relays his story. Prince Ibrahim immediately dismisses the tailor’s story, but the King gives Mustafa a chance to prove his honesty by telling a story in accordance with their culture’s customs: by having thirteen layers of meaning. Mustafa recounts the story of a tailor who, having repeatedly failed to make clothing for a wedding, tells the groom that he must not be ready to wear the garments since they refused to be made.
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