Secret Rendezvous

This was the first Kobe Abe book I've read. It a short quick read, but rather crazy. I'm not sure what really happened or why. A lot of things are so random and therefore entertaining. I would recommend this book to those who like well written books with great imagery and that are thought-provoking, but ultimately lack the usual plot structure and conclusion of a story.

Surrealism exemplified some of the most famous works by Kobo Abe (1924-1993), earning him comparisons to Franz Kafka. Surrealism as a 20th-century literary and artistic movement attempted to express the workings of the subconscious. His work Mikkai (Secret Rendezvous) is worth a read for its use of fantastic imagery and the incongruous juxtaposition of scientific data with bizarre nightmare-like scenarios. Secret Rendezvous is relevant in its description of the trappings of an increasingly technological society and its critique of a hospital system gone haywire. Each patient requires a secret agent to penetrate the bureaucratic system, and each person also appears to be under surveillance, mimicking the modern-day question, "Is Big Brother watching you?"

From the very start of this short, but densely labyrinthine and surreally intense novel, you know that you're in strange territory. An ambulance comes unbidden in the middle of the night, spirits away a man's perfectly healthy wife, and he's left to begin a Kafkaesque search to find out what's become of her in a hospital whose nightmarish bureaucracy is concealing a bizarre and ominous program of sex research. Abe has the rare talent of making even the most outlandish situations seem perfectly plausible and that's what lends *Secret Rendezvous* its riveting sense of psychological truth and subjective terror. Like a powerful myth, there's something more *real* than real about the protagonist's endlessly frustrating search, his alternating states of inexplicable omnipotence and paralyzing impotence, his longing to find his missing wife and his fear of doing so. Like Robbe-Grillet, Abe is a master of moody erotic dread and the hint of horrors forever just out of view. Unlike Robbe-Grillet, Abe's storyline, though fractured, is not obsessively repetitive; though detailed, it's not frozen in time--events move forward towards a conclusion that, although ambiguous, nevertheless seems eerily inevitable. Explicit, often shocking, never purely prurient, and, at times, even surprisingly funny, *Secret Rendezvous* is a disturbing and thought-provoking novel by a writer who strikes me as one of the most under-appreciated of the 20th century. His sexually-charged themes and dark insights into psychological dilemmas flatly without resolution make a point about the problematic nature of the human condition that is not easily assimilated to a culture that still believes in solutions...in fact, that still believes in the concept of `humanity' at all. Perhaps, that makes Abe more relevant now than ever.

The hospital is a labyrinth of human depravity. A man wanders through it searching for his wife, constantly assaulted by odd and insane sights, sounds, and people. Written with mind piercing clarity and description.