Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe

The Pleasure of the Text

Show Notes and More:

Kōbō Abe

The late Kōbō Abe (安部 公房), (1924-1993), was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer, and inventor. He was the son of a doctor and studied medicine at Tokyo University; however, he never practised, instead giving it up to join a literary group that aimed to apply surrealist techniques to Marxist ideology. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities. Though he did much work as an avant-garde novelist and playwright, it was not until the publication of The Woman in the Dunes in 1962 that he won widespread international acclaim. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara in the film adaptations of The Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and The Ruined Map. In 1973, he founded an acting studio in Tokyo, where he trained performers and directed plays. He was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. Other works by Kōbō Abe:

• The Ruined Map
• The Box Man
• Secret Rendevous
• The Woman in the Dunes
• The Face of Another
• The Ark Sakura
• The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kobo
• Three Plays by Kōbō Abe
• Kangaroo Notebook

Machi Yamada

In 1945 Machi Yamada and Kōbō Abe married. Machi Abe was a success in her own right. An artist and a stage director, the couple saw successes within their fields in similar time frames. They joined a number of artistic study groups, such as The Night Society and the Japanese Literary School. Machi Abe illustrated Inter Ice Age 4.

Virago Classics

Virago Modern Classics are "dedicated to the celebration of women writers and to the rediscovery and reprinting of their works. Its aim was, and is, to demonstrate the existence of a female tradition in literature and to broaden the sometimes narrow definition of a 'classic', which has often led to the neglect of interesting books." Some of our favourites are:

• Mrs Polfrey and the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
• Frost in May by Antonia White
• The Lost Traveller by Antonia White

Editors of Kobo Abe’s work mentioned

Juliet W. Carpenters- An American translator of modern Japanese literature. Born in the American Midwest, she studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. After completing her graduate studies in 1973, she returned to Japan in 1975, where she became involved in translation efforts and teaching. Other works translated by Carpenter:

• Japanese Women: Short Stories by Yamamoto Shūgorō
• The Hunter by Nonami Asa
• Masks by Enchi Fumiko
• Shadow Family by Miyabe Miyuki
• A Lost Paradise by Watanabe Jun'ichi

E. Dale Saunders (1919-1995) – Was an American scholar of Romance languages and literature, Japanese Buddhism, classical Japanese literature, and East Asian civilization. Saunders obtained an A.B. degree from Western Reserve University in 1941 and an M.A. in Romance Philology from Harvard in 1942. He continued his studies in Japanese after joining the U.S. Naval Reserve, later earning an M.A. from Harvard in 1948 and an Doctorat de l'Université de Paris in 1953. Other works translated by Saunders:

• Inter Ice Age 4
• The Woman in the Dunes
• The Face of Another
• The Ruined Map
• The Box Man

The Ruined Map, The Box Man, and Secret Rendezvous exist in a Trilogy of sorts:

The Ruined Map [1967]

Mr. Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these, he embarks upon an ever more puzzling pursuit that leads him into the depths of Tokyo’s dangerous underworld, where he begins to lose the boundaries of his own identity. Surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike, Abe’s masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind.

The Box Man [1973]

In this eerie and evocative masterpiece, the nameless protagonist gives up his identity and the trappings of a normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo and scribbling madly on the interior walls of his box, he describes the world outside as he sees or perhaps imagines it, a tenuous reality that seems to include a mysterious rifleman determined to shoot him, a seductive young nurse, and a doctor who wants to become a box man himself. The Box Man is a marvel of sheer originality and a bizarrely fascinating fable about the very nature of identity.

Secret Rendezvous [1977]

From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent characters. Within a few days, though no closer to finding his wife, the unnamed narrator finds himself appointed the hospital’s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he’s a horse. With its nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life, Secret Rendezvous is another masterpiece from Japan’s most gifted and original writer of serious fiction.

Raymond Chandler

American-British novelist and screenwriter, the late Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) became a detective fiction writer at the age of 44 after losing his job at an oil company during the Great Depression. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime, with the majority of those made into motion pictures. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was made into a film, and an anecdote told about Chandler is that when asked about who killed the chauffeur, he didn’t know!

• The Big Sleep
• Farwell, My Lovely
• The High Window
• The Lady in the Lake
• The Little Sister
• The Long Good-Bye
• Playback

Yukio Mishima

An incredibly interesting character, and described as one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century, the late Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, and founder of the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia. In 1968 he was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but in the end, it was awarded to Yasunari Kawabata, his countryman and benefactor. According to the author and translator, Andrew Rankin, Mishima’s work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death." His works include:

• Confessions of a Mask
• The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
• Sun and Steel

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