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Book Review: "Secret Rendezvous" by Kōbō Abe

5/5 - A gorgeously written darkly comic book

By Annie KapurPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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This book is about a man who searches for his missing wife after she disappears from a hospital and people are refusing to help him. From cracking a cold beer open in a morgue to not being able to use an elevator because you go up into some part of the hospital and come down dead - this man is not just comically frantic, but the drama is heavy. I say the drama is heavy because of the way we go from being comically frantic to a man who is trying to find his own identity whilst also trying to find out where his wife is and why she is gone.

The language of this book is beautiful and the author reminds me of other Japanese authors I have read, especially Yasunari Kawabata. The writing style is a beautiful mixture between charming, descriptive and brutally honest. Within some of the scenes, I felt a bit sick because of the content, but the way Kobo Abe wrote it is as if he is trying to put you at ease. It may not completely put you at ease, but the way in which he mixes black comedy with the frantic and tense nature of the man involved is an attempt to make the reader laugh. However, though this is the case, I would still say that the main aim of the author in this book was to break down and rebuild the male character through the various experiences that come with losing his wife in the hospital. Let’s take a look at some quotations:

“When a person is hurt the important thing isn’t sympathy for the pain, but somebody to stop the bleeding, disinfect the wound, and sew it up. You have to treat the injured person not like a human being with a wound, but like a human wound. For a doctor who’s used to such relationships, nothing is more maddening than a patient who acts like a goddam human being. To keep from arousing his doctor’s anger, the patient tries to stop being human. The doctor becomes more and more alone, his nerves go on edge, and he drifts farther and farther from humanity. I guess you could even say a prejudice against patients is one requirement for a great doctor.”

The way in which the author talks about pain is not only greatly human but it is also again, brutally honest. It reads like something that everyone can relate to in some way, shape or form but the author is fully aware yet, that not everyone can relate to the situation in which the character finds themselves. Let’s have a look at another:

“If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.”

I feel like collapsing when I read this quotation because of the way the author talks about how ‘monsters’ are part of the weak. It is not only a suggestion that the weak turn into monsters after a lifetime of being pushed about.

The start of the book is written in a different context to the rest and contains a number of different writing styles which makes for an interesting read. I finally want to share with you my favourite quotation from the whole book and here it is:

“I gnaw on a quilt made of the girl’s mother and lick drops of the water oozing from the concrete walls, clinging tightly to this secret rendezvous for one that no one begrudge me now. However much I may resent the fact, ’tomorrow’s newspaper’ has stolen a march on me; and so, in the past called tomorrow, over and over I continue to certainly die. Embracing a tender, secret rendezvous for one…”

I know, it sounds gorgeous, right? The language of death is one of the things in this book that will make you weak at the knees. It is not conventionally existential but instead, it is knowing that one day, we are going to die and yet, constantly having no reason to be bothered about it at all. It is a consciousness of death but not a worry, not a bother, not a reason for not doing anything. Instead, it is a call to action and without this death, there would be no reason to do what you wanted at all.

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About the Creator

Annie Kapur

190K+ Reads on Vocal.

English Lecturer

🎓Literature & Writing (B.A)

🎓Film & Writing (M.A)

🎓Secondary English Education (PgDipEd)

📍Birmingham, UK

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