If one could imagine a Tom Stoppard "Jumpers" written by Lewis Carroll and Kafka, translated with a minimal sense of topography to a modern Japanese setting (with a touch of Borges, as it were), one might be somewhere near grasping what Abe has done [in "Secret Rendezvous"]. But the stockpile of influences or analogues doesn't weaken or invalidate the book, which is both original and edgily entertaining….

The story concerns the head of a jump-shoe sales team, jump-shoes being a type of sports footwear with bouncy soles that make the wearer super-buoyant. One morning an ambulance suddenly and inexplicably arrives and carries off the salesman's wife, taking her to an enormous underground hospital. Bewildered, the salesman sets out to find her….

[The] book takes on a rich array of satirical targets, from total information systems to the elite mysteries—and obfuscations—of modern medicine: therapies, transplants, sex research...