Secret Rendezvous

About

At four in the morning, an ambulance arrives to take the man's wife away — though no one called it, and nothing is wrong with her. His search through the corridors of a vast underground hospital leads him past sinister doctors, freakish sexual experiments, and the persistent sensation of being watched by something he cannot see. Kobo Abe's surreal thriller operates with the logic of a bureaucratic nightmare — each corridor leading to another corridor, each authority figure redirecting him to another authority figure, the search for his wife becoming an end in itself. The hospital is simultaneously a real place and a metaphor for every institution that consumes the people it claims to serve. A novel about looking for someone in a system designed to make finding them impossible — and the growing suspicion that the system is the point.