Tokyo cancelled

Tokyo cancelled 

13 cities 13 stories 13 protagonists 13 day dreams 13 love stories 

After Rushdie if someone gets magical realism, it’s Mr. Rana Dasgupta. There is of course world literature from. Well travelled man, who has observed lives happening around him. And absorbing all this he goes to sleep to dream about them. Then waking up in the middle of the night or mornings with random ideas of his dreams, taking them further thru the journey of day dreams. 

Dasgupta surprises you with the diversity of his stories but underlying all of it are sad love stories, of a man in Tokyo falling in love with his own creation a doll, a man in New York falling in love with a girl who turns into a soho building, a girl from Odessa falling for a Bangladeshi sea in the city of love Paris, a changeling trying to find a word to heal a mysterious tree man. 

These stories are as real as ones dreams. Sometimes you wake up and find yourself in a fake world, missing the real dream world. That’s how I felt every time I paused reading this book. The book that celebrated dreams, like Freud you can interpret these or live them... because dreams are the balm to our soul. The way we interpret these stories tell us a lot about our ownselves. Our thoughts, our fears, our losses, our insecurities, our passion, our hopes and our story... somewhere living in our subconscious away from the happenings of the material world. 

There are moments when dreams drag and you feel odd chasing the imaginary characters and you realise it’s your own mind trying to show you what’s there under all the layers of the obvious. What our heart desires, our brain visualises and the eyes are. 

And what you see is a world so visionary, where the dreams and even nightmares come to life.  This book imagined what a pandemic world be like that it felt it has been written now, but it was written in early 2000s and was way ahead of time.   It visualises the scenario albeit a small pic scenario in France but the response of people and the affects on our environment was the same. Life is so predictable yet so  strange. But that’s what a powerful story does, it doesn’t tell you only about past but also the future yet to happen.