Kobo Abe refuses to write a conventional novel. He gives us a series of "notebooks" (and epilogue); within the "notebooks" are charts, banks of information, and clues. The fictional structure is a labyrinth, a "secret rendezvous" of science and poetry….
[In Secret Rendezvous, Abe is] giving us a violent and night-marish work. He deliberately mingles fear and pleasure to force us toward a philosophical position…. The novel outmaneuvers us;… it is full of deceptions, conceits, and reflections—and it suggests that "reality itself"—that is, the world outside of the fiction-world is ultimately inexplicable.
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