“Tokyo Cancelled” A Postmodern Reading of Rana Dasgupta: A Review

Abstract

Tokyo Cancelled, the debut text of the award-winning author Rana Dasgupta, who also won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for his brilliant second novel Solo (2009), seeks to connect the contemporary techno-cultural world and the eerie world of myth, fantasy, magic, and imagination. Dasgupta chooses new ways of representing the world with his postmodernist experimentation Tokyo Cancelled as he continues to do in Solo as well. In a contemporary anonymous international airport, Dasgupta makes thirteen stranded passengers tell thirteen stories which in turn transport the reader to the realms of magic and fantasy. While rejecting the conventional mode of narration, and going away from the traditional concepts, Dasgupta creates a pastiche of postmodern events, occurrences, events, and characters. The author celebrates the elements of irony, paranoia, fragmentation, parody, dark humour, magic realism, and techno-culture which hold the very essence of a postmodern society and its habitants. This paper, thus, from a postmodern perspective, attempts to analyze the contemporizing of the fantastic elements existent in the text Tokyo Cancelled.