![]() ![]() The one being minced, peeled, and poked at by wiretaps and shadowers was a man. ![]() In fact, there was no trace of any woman, let alone my wife. “Nowhere in those recordings was there the slightest trace of my wife. Initially the investigations take the form of N listening to recordings of hospital sounds (à la a stethoscope sussing out “signs” of illness). Eventually, N is asked by the assistant director of the hospital, a man who resembles in more ways then one a horse (one of the great “reveals” of the book), to conduct a series of investigations to uncover the whereabouts of his wife. With his life interrupted by the strange disappearance of his wife, N journeys to the unsettling world of the local hospital. N, originally a male nude model, works as a salaryman for a the “Subaru Sporting Goods Store” where he promotes “jump shoes” which can propel the jumper to 37% greater distances and heights (3, 15, 17). The unnamed narrator (N) is spurned into entering the hospital after “one summer morning an ambulance suddenly drove up, though no one remembered having sent for one, and carried away the man’s wife” (8). Within this veritable entity lacking a functional guiding agent, a harrowing, existential, and surreal Freudian mystery unfolds. The hospital body lurches and vibrates with the sounds of its doctors and orderlies as they rewire the building’s organs and nerves in order to experiment on themselves and their patients. Within its labyrinthine interior, humans (agents of “disease”) animate various functions of the hospital for their own purposes–some sinister, some scientific, some sinisterly scientific. 1979) the hospital stretches like a recumbent body, leaking fluids through its membranes and undefined in its expansiveness, across the urban landscape. In Kobo Abe’s Secret Rendezvous (1977, trans. (Tadanoi Yokoo’s cover for the 1979 edition) ![]()
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