Yet this is little indication of the truly morbid turn the novel will take as the narrator's investigation carries him further and further into the recesses of the subterranean hospital. The narrator's tacit acceptance of what strikes the reader as illogical and absurd-investigating himself because of his wife's mysterious disappearance-accustoms the reader to the eerie, macabre atmosphere that persists throughout the entire novel. Without challenging orders, he concludes that this may simply be a more tactful and precise way of filing a complaint-and so he justifies his task. Although intending to conduct an investigation into his wife's disappearance, the salesman is told that he must instead investigate himself. The narrator, a salesman of jump shoes, a kind of sneakers with springs built into the soles, tells of his investigation through three assiduously-kept notebooks compiled from his own memory and from conversations taped by microphones hidden throughout the hospital. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist's obsession is to locate his wife, who has been mysteriously carted from their home by an ambulance that no one summoned. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. His style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. Abe's sixth and most recent book could pass, like his others, for a Western novel. Except for place names and a few distinctly oriental metaphors ("his thoughts shrank like a piece of fat meat plunged into boiling water"), Secret Rendezvous. The irony, however, is that for the leading literary figure in Japan, Abe's writing has a remarkably Western flavor.
IF, AS MANY CRITICS have claimed, Kobo Abe is the best living Japanese novelist, it may only be because so many others (most notably Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata) have committed suicide.
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