Secret Meeting

Kobo Abe — a brilliant star of the post-war Japanese avant-garde; his books are read all over the world, films are made from them, and plays are staged. A continuer of the traditions of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka,... and Alberto Moravia, a forerunner of Haruki Murakami, in each of his novels he creates a surreal reality that reformats the reader's worldview, distorts — or clarifies — the prisms of perception and completely overwhelms each time. No wonder another famous Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, called Abe the greatest writer in the history of literature...
In "Secret Meeting," the main character's wife is taken to the hospital by unknown orderlies, even though she is perfectly healthy. Trying to get her back, the bewildered hero plunges into hospital hell — a Kafkaesque state within a state, a surreal world within itself, where the only way to survive is to become part of the system and play by the rules, shutting one's eyes to the ubiquitous and all-too-familiar absurdity.