If one could imagine a Tom Stoppard "Jumpers" written by Lewis Carroll and Kafka, translated with a minimal sense of topography to a modern Japanese setting (with a touch of Borges, as it were), one might be somewhere near grasping what Abe has done [in "Secret Rendezvous"]. But the stockpile of influences or analogues doesn't weaken or invalidate the book, which is both original and edgily entertaining….

The story concerns the head of a jump-shoe sales team, jump-shoes being a type of sports footwear with bouncy soles that make the wearer super-buoyant. One morning an ambulance suddenly and inexplicably arrives and carries off the salesman's wife, taking her to an enormous underground hospital. Bewildered, the salesman sets out to find her….

[The] book takes on a rich array of satirical targets, from total information systems to the elite mysteries—and obfuscations—of modern medicine: therapies, transplants, sex research in the name of enlightenment. And there are links with Abe's earlier novels. As in "The Woman in the Dunes," the central character is cut off from his home and his accustomed society, with the underground labyrinth and alien organization of the hospital substituted for the labyrinthine underground community Abe's insect-collector found in the dunes. As in "The Face of Another," "Secret Rendezvous" is made up of notebooks that attempt to hang on to a disintegrating personality. As in "The Ruined Map," a man's search for a disappearing person involves the loss of his own identity.

What is new in Abe's work is the clinical sense of comedy; it's a disconcertingly funny book, outrageously but successfully exploiting the comic possibilities of arbitrariness and metamorphosis. Oddly—or perhaps not so oddly—it's mainly the food references (often metaphorical rather than literal) that make the book feel Japanese: clouds move across the evening sky "like overboiled rice cakes," and so on. The idiom is sometimes too thick with clichés, which may or may not be the translator's fault: "falling for it hook, line, and sinker," "a wild-goose chase" and "he was in real hot water" within the space of four lines is a bit much. But "Secret Rendezvous" is always lucid and readable; the logic of its illogic is inexorable, and underneath its easy colloquial style lies a toughly reasonable view of the loneliness, the incommunicability and the cruelty of man.