Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled is perhaps the latest attempt at creating the logic of storytelling as a way of sustaining and preserving a community. In Trinh T. Minh-Ha's Woman Native Other, Minh-Ha talks about how in more than one tradition, people sat around fires listening to stories. Since Minh-Ha is promoting the idea of the woman storyteller in this book, she calls it ‘Grandma's story’. In her article ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’, Toni Morrison mentions oral storytelling traditions as one way through which the black community preserved some sense of self-definition or integration:

One such function is ‘healing.’ I don't know if Rana Dasgupta's stories in Tokyo Cancelled have any ‘healing’ functions. They seem like incredibly clever finger exercises, which illuminate certain chilling, atrophying, bizarre and grotesque dimensions of a globally impacted world, where cyber space with all the virtual realities it generates determines and controls not only the world of business, commerce, Science and Technology, but also people's lives and emotions. Is Dasgupta in fact sounding a warning bell that cyber space is potentially and actually destructive and demeaning of life and simultaneously of Art as well?

Through the stilted and frozen narrative aesthetics of this collection of tales that seems to be following the same structural pattern of The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and The Arabian Nights, storytelling, although still possible, does not seem like an answer to the crises of emotion and relationship that these stories are nonetheless pointing to. At the most we can say that the story still exists, seemingly as narrative resonant as the fourteenth-century Chaucerian world, but each storyteller seems like a clone of the other one, almost faceless and emotionally dead, with storytelling simply reflecting congealed and deadened life currents.