Kobo Abe delights in the excessive and the perverse. With its surrealistic setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, and its increasingly distressing scenes of sexual decadence and violence, Secret Rendezvous disturbs rather than titillates. To the Western mind at least, this book is maddeningly, perhaps pointlessly, abstruse….

[Abe's hero] sets off one morning to track down his wife, who has been carried off, inexplicably, by an ambulance. Once inside the labyrinthian underground hospital, the man (the characters don't have names, only abstract identities) finds himself conducting his own full-scale investigation. The ostensible object of his search is his wife, but soon he realizes that in a strange way he is involved in a penetrating self-investigation, and the hospital officials who profess to be helping him actually spin out the hunt by luring him deeper and deeper into their own demented activities….

[Hospital] administrators do not do anything as straightforward as...