At a little after four o’clock one morning an ambulance, lights and siren going, arrives at the narrator’s home to take his wife away. She’s in perfect health and doesn’t need one; but they carry her out on a stretcher anyway and, stupidly, the man doesn’t go with her. As the hours pass and the phone doesn’t ring it slowly dawns on him that, in effect, she’s been carried off only half-dressed by two masked strangers, and now seems to have completely disappeared. Having eventually tracked down the correct hospital, he finds no trace of her there—in fact they deny she was ever admitted.
    Then it all starts to get strange. The “hospital” (if it actually is one) is partly derelict and partly underground, is being run by a man who is experimenting himself and, within days, the narrator has not only become its head of security, but is handed three reels of audiotape to analyse. What’s on them is a series of wire-tapped phone calls and bugged conversations…of himself. Attempting (or apparently attempting) to find his vanished wife, he’s instead being told to investigate himself: the clues to his wife’s disappearance may lie in his own behaviour. All this leaves the reader (or left this reader anyway) wondering: did she really “disappear” like this, or was it an ingenious way of getting rid of her? Or did the lady herself set the whole thing up? Does the narrator even have a wife at all? Is he nuts?
    Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes (1964) is wonderfully odd, The Box Man (1973) a fiendishly intricate and deeply peculiar masterpiece—and I was hoping for something similar here. And maybe that is what it is. Secret Rendezvous (1977) probably is an even more extreme example of the same kind of thing—its narrator not so much “unreliable” as creepily mad, and much of what he’s telling us a mix of half-truths, fantasies and outright lies. The sort of thing I like working out usually, and yet… Maybe it was the sex (what was shocking four decades ago, in Japan, no longer so) or an author trying too hard to live up to his reputation (in his day he was that country’s most successful novelist). The opening was promising enough; but for me, even after a reread, the rest dragged badly. ( )

A woman is taken away in the middle of the night by ambulance, although she is not ill. Her husband traces her to a huge, underground hospital and finds that she disappeared from reception before being officially admitted. No one is prepared to tell the man where his wife has gone. Is she lost or imprisoned in the labyrinths of the hospital? Is she dead? Has she escaped? Has she arranged her own disappearance? The man is employed by a bizarre individual, who seems to be half man, half horse, to find the woman. The man must report his investigation in a journal, which has to be written in the third person. The book consists of the man's three journals.

Secret Rendezvous seems to be operating on many levels. (I say "seems' because I'm not at all sure what I've just read.) There's the aspect of surveillance, with the hospital full of bugs and hidden cameras that send data to a central security system. There's an indictment of a hospital system where patients enter and cannot leave, doctors tout for business and recruit patients to specialties without reference to their symptoms, doctors and nurses use patients for their own entertainment and perform strange sexual experiments on them; the head of security sells the tapes for profit. There's a confusion of identities, an inability to know who people really are: a man who acts as though he is a horse, who is actually a doctor and the deputy director; doctors who are patients and patients who are doctors; a girl whose shape changes because of a bone disease; the man's wife, who might not be the woman he thought he knew. There's a thread about masculinity and erections, femininity and orgasms, and an awful lot of masturbation. Some reviews describe this as an erotic novel, but with all this sex being about violent experimentation and power machinations, it didn't seem that way to me.

Reading Secret Rendezvous was like being plunged into someone's nightmare. I felt the claustrophobia, the panic, the confusion and the powerlessness, but I didn't quite understand what was going on. ( )

I have finished [Secret Rendezvous] just now which was simultaneously mesmerizing and confounding, fairly typical of Abe. Having turned the last page, I started thinking about what it was I had just read and what it all meant and I found that to understand this book, I had to compare it to other Abe works. Thus, my review might turn more into an essay as I compare it briefly to [Face of Another] and [The Box Man]. Although I don't believe Abe really has "spoilers" as he does not write in a traditional way, I do warn that this review(/essay) will refer to specific plot points and will offer my idea of what the book is about, which might skew your own thoughts if you choose to read the book yourself. If you do decide to continue reading, I hope you find what will probably become a rambling, interesting.

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The back of the book and most other internet users will summarize the book as such: An ambulance arrives uncalled in the middle of the night to take away a man's wife despite her claims that she is perfectly fine. The unnamed protagonist is left to find her, but when he arrives at the hospital things are atypical of a hospital visit. In his attempt to find his wife, the man becomes employed by a horse as chief of security and tunnels his way through the labyrinth of a hospital to find her. As he searches, he becomes entwined with slues of strange characters, voyeur to sexual experiments and falls to a sort of mental manipulation. The quote on the back of the book states that this is Abe's "nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life". Others on the internet appreciate the feel of the novel but some are not quite sure what they have just read.

This is where I look at his other works to understand, or at least, to attempt.

Abe, as I have come to understand him, likes to write about identity and the preservation of, or, destruction of identity within and outside the parameters of society. With [Face of Another] he explored the idea of the face and the face's physical influence on identity. When the character's face was destroyed, he was left to either rebuild his same face and recreate his once persona, or build a new face and attempt to create a new persona. But it was up to society to decide which persona was allowed to come out. In [The Box Man], Abe once again explored the idea of identity when the character wished to escape the eyes of society and limit his world to that of a box. Initially he was doing fine until society knocked on his box trying to shake him out of what was considered un-society-like, thus creating a character trying to kill him. [Secret Rendezvous] is really just a retelling of these similar themes.

Presentation of the book as a series of notebooks.
The wife.
A character set to kill the main character or to shake him and bring him back into the eyes of "regular" society.
An enclosure where the character is constantly running, escaping.

All in all it comes to the same. The character, once a working member of society, has fallen prey to some sort of accident. In this case, an incident based on self repression of sexual thought due to wanting to fit into societal norms despite a strong sexual appetite. As often happens when people fall ill to what is considered atypical and not part of the norm, he becomes an outcast and starts to fall more into delinquency until in the end, he loses his own identity. And the book is his quest to find it and to return to normal (represented by his wife, who has most likely left him in real life). However, in his quest to find himself he just progressively loses himself even more until the hospital remains this perpetual labyrinth where toilets turn into secret passageways and festivals are actually secret plots and elevators don't seem to go to the second floor. Abe gives many hints to the reader about where reality is to be found. He often quotes "Doctors make the best patients and patients the best doctors", and just like the horse tells the man (as the protagonist is called) that the secret of his dilemma lies in the first part of the tapes he has to listen to, the secret of the book likes in the first page: the realistic introduction of the characters and his hobbies as might be written in the page of a doctor's notebook. More importantly, the notebook of a doctor based in psychiatry. And the notebooks of the character are really an attempt by the doctor to find the source of his patient's problems by having the patient investigate himself.

With this I just find it truly amazing what Abe can present. At the same time, presenting the downfall of a character while showing the limitations of a society when presented with the extremes of society's pleasures, in this case, sexual desire. In the wanting of society to dumb down and bring modesty to sexual desire and lust, and the wanting of science to understand where it comes from, both lose their ability to see it as its most basic form. And when something becomes taboo, extremes are formed which causes even more confusion and desire.

So Abe's ability to show how identity shapes society and vice versa is just remarkable and it's what makes me such a fan. I can't wait till the next one. ( )

The feelings of it make sense, but I could not say what the facts were.

For those of you familiar with the works of Kobo Abe, be prepared for another wild ride in Secret Rendevous. Our narrator, "the man", is in search of his wife. She had been transported away from home by ambulance in the middle of the night although no one reported a medical emergency nor had anything been wrong with her. In the morning, "the man" decides to follow up on his wife's mysterious disappearance.

"The man" finds the hospital into which he believes his wife disappeared and begins more earnest attempts to find her. His search is bizarre. He is told by his friend, "the horse", to keep a notebook of his quest and record himself in the third person (hence "the man"). What ensues is a strange, sexy, almost funny search through a hospital which we soon realize is actually some sort of a labyrinth.

This book is divided into three notebooks and an epilogue. You probably will have no idea what's going on until you begin the third notebook. It's all very confusing, but I think I did well in trying to understand it. I've given up trying to understand Abe's works while I read them, however I find them to be exceptionally well written, detailed, and of great interest.

Is this novel a social satire? I don't know. As in The Woman in the Dunes and The Box Man, two other works of Abe which I found intriguing, this is a genuinely fun work to attempt to decipher. Try it! ( )