Tokyo Cancelled
One additional item that happened perhaps as a result of not playing video games in September was that I managed to read a good book during my daily subway commute. Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta is a collection of stories in the spirit of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as told by characters stuck spending the night snowed into a Japanese airport after having to make an unscheduled landing.
The stories start out semi-normal, but their imaginativeness quickly spirals out of control into the fantastic. A woman in love with Robert DeNiro’s illegitimate son can turn into Madison Avenue shops by eating magical Oreo cookies, a guy creates a Japanese sex doll that turns on him after learning how to be a woman by surfing the internet, another woman is followed across thousands of miles by a bird whose wings have been cut off, a poor guy inflicted with a plant growing inside him takes an immortal being with him when he dies, a young Indian woman makes plants grow exponentially whenever she sleeps and more. (I’ve actually already forgotten some of the stories although not because of their lack of worth, but rather because of my lack of memory.)
Anyway, one of the early stories really stood out to me was about a guy who saved the people of the world from losing their memories by being a receptacle for everyone else’s memories (both good and bad) until he overflowed releasing the memories back out into the world. I wish I had a guy like that hanging onto my memories I so quickly forget until I need them….
Oh well, I should remember to read more books.
