SECRET RENDEZVOUS BY KOBO ABE

I’m not sure how to even begin to describe this book but here are a few key plot details….

Our hero sells athletic shoes called “jump shoes” for a living that give people the power to leap small distances….One night an ambulance shows up at his house without being called and takes away his wife who is apparently healthy….This being Japan and the novel being one of the most extreme and surreal neither he nor his wife think to stop the paramedics and argue with them why they are taking her away….

The rest of the book involves him attempting to find his wife in the labyrinthine hospital she’s been taken….While clues are given at the end, we never really find out what happened to her….Instead, we have a character called “The Horse” who is am literally walking and adopting the physical motions of a horse….A young girl who is constantly sexually aroused but whose bones are melting so she becomes more and more a blob of jelly….Another character has a disease that makes her turn into cotton and she is eventually knitted into a quilt to be used by her daughter….All the patients in this hospital are sexually active and sneak away to hotels where they are unknowingly taped in action….These tapes are sold by the hospital as erotic accessories

Aside from the odd deviant sex and peculiar incidents (the hero becomes the chief of security for the hospital during his search when he accidentally kills the old chief of security), there is not much here….

This is not the first book I’ve read by Kobo Abe http://rgdinmalaysia.blogspot.com/2009/02/box-man-part-one-box-man-by-kobo-abe.html but THE BOX MAN had a clearer structure, had a better foundation for its surreal explorations, and a message….This book is just weird….Fun for those who want a reading experience that makes absolutely no sense….I guess the message in the end is something along the lines of each patient embracing his or her disease but it’s so jumbled it’s hard to figure anything out.

The end of SECRET RENDEZVOUS which finds the hero permanently lost in some kind of maze seems too easy….I would expect more from a book that is so self-consciously bizarre.