WINNER OF THE MISHIMA YUKIO PRIZE
A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK 2023
An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud and abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young half-Russian, half-Japanese man.
Inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” this novel is a further demonstration of Kashimada’s distinctive literary style and technique and her commitment to plumbing the depths of her characters’ psychology. Dealing with the travails and traumas of history, with gendered identity, with the tension between private and public selves, Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a distinctive and intriguing novel by one of Japan’s most unique contemporary authors.
“Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a profound and deeply intelligent work, a refreshing inversion of what has become traditional trauma narratives, in which history is presented as an inescapable, fatalistic force informing every contemporary outcome.”—Leland Cheuk, NPR
“Kashimada’s book blurs the national and the personal in a way that suggests the continued difficulty of working through world-historical trauma.. .An extended exercise in what it means to attempt to describe the indescribable.”—Jane Hu, The New York Times Book Review
“Metaphor is the greatest strength of Kashimada’s work... Love at Six Thousand Degrees takes full advantage of Christianity’s symbolic possibilities.”—Asian Review of Books
“A novel about learning to acknowledge bad memories rather than hide them away.”—Foreword Reviews
