Secret Rendezvous

°°°

From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic & comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.

From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, & an array of very odd & even violent characters. Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospital’s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he’s a horse. With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine & modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japan’s most gifted & original writer of serious fiction. 

°°°

Kobo Abe was born in Tokyo in 1924 & grew up in Mukden, Manchuria, during WWII. In 1948 he received a medical degree from Tokyo Imperial University, but he never practiced medicine. Considered one of Japan’s foremost novelists, his most famous works include The Face of Another (1964), The Box Man (1973), Secret Rendezvous (1977), & The Ark Sakura (1984). All of Abe’s books have been bestsellers in Japan & he was the recipient of numerous literary awards & prizes, including the Yomiuri Prize for The Woman in the Dunes in 1962. He collaborated with director Hiroshi Teshigahara on film adaptations of 4 of his novels—including The Woman in the Dunes—& was also widely known as a dramatist. He died in 1993.