Tokyo Cancelled.

TOKYO CANCELLED

BY RANA DASGUPTA 

NEW YORK: BLACK CAT. 400 PAGES. $13.

After a snowstorm grounds their flight to Tokyo, thirteen strangers are stranded overnight at an unnamed airport. Instead of occupying themselves with typical lounging area pastimes--trashy paperbacks, CNN news loops, fitful sleep--the travelers spend the night telling each other tales. Such is the device that Rana Dasgupta employs to organize the stories in his first book, Tokyo Cancelled. This scheme, borrowed from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is well chosen, and given the international settings of the stories (Paris, New York, Istanbul, Delhi), Dasgupta's airport is particularly appropriate as the book's narrative hub.

Dasgupta's stories, however, diverge from those of Chaucer in adopting the fairy-tale genre to enliven the narrative. "Not so long ago," the first story begins, "in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim." As the collection proceeds, we encounter a range of classic tropes: an outcast son, a maiden locked in a tower, a forbidden room at the top of the stairs, a child (two, actually) of mysterious parentage. While the causal latitude of the fairy-tale genre allows Dasgupta to give free reign to his exuberant imagination, the results are not always successful.

What's missing in many of his stories is a sense of unifying structure. In the headlong tumble of the plot, the conceit that sets events in motion is often neglected, or left behind entirely, so that the end of a story does not follow from the beginning. The tenth story, for instance, commences with a character exposed as a changeling within a society intolerant of his kind; after five pages of exposition, this premise is abandoned in favor of a plot about an old man suffering from a rare disease that is gradually turning him into a plant. In "The Store on Madison Avenue," the bastard child of actor Robert De Niro is secretly raised by a crew of Polish airport workers, who name him Pavel. By the end of the story, when Pavel defeats a Chinese crime boss by imprisoning him in stone (a trick he learns from a magic Oreo cookie), the reader is left wondering why De Niro was even mentioned.

As whimsical as many of Dasgupta's stories are, they sometimes verge on the bewildering, particularly in the absence of well-formed characters that would serve to focus the reader's attention. This deficiency is most evident in the narrative frame. Unlike The Canterbury Tales, Tokyo Cancelled never introduces its travelers, so readers are denied the pleasure of observing how each tale reflects on its teller. "Does anyone have a business card?" someone asks, when all the tales are finished. But just as Dasgupta introduces this revelatory moment, his characters depart, without our having had anything more than a glimpse of them. The reader feels the loss keenly, but at least the stories remain.