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Love at Six Thousand Degrees
WINNER OF THE MISHIMA YUKIO PRIZE
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.
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.
128 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2005
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February 20, 2024
‘Tears can’t express the tragedy of six thousand degrees. Yet still she can’t help but cry.’
Some moments in history send shockwaves across decades, some so violent it is more like shrapnel that still hurts long after. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are such events, killing an estimated between 129,000 and 226,000 people and casting a long shadow through time of our destructive capabilities. Maki Kashimada’s Love at Six Thousand Degrees, the title referencing the ground temperature when the bomb exploded over the city, spirals through existential wounds at both a personal and national level as an unnamed woman plagued by visions of a mushroom cloud suddenly leaves her husband and young child to visit the city of Nagasaki. There she meets a young man with whom she has an affair based on their mutual suffering. Winner of the Yukio Mishima Prize, and inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for the extraordinary 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima, Mon Amour with which this story has many parallels, this is a story of losing oneself in order to try and find yourself. Teeming with dynamic symbolism and eluding simple interpretation, Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a brief but complex story of memory and overcoming personal pains colliding with each other while being tossed on the waves of generational trauma.
‘Close your eyes. Pretend to be one more corpse belonging to this land.’
I love when books seem to serendipitously find us. I had just watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour and was scrolling upcoming Europa translations when I discovered this was to be released a week away. Fresh from loving the film that inspired it, I absolutely HAD to read it. Those familiar with the film will notice thematic and stylistic similarities here. Taking place in Nagasaki instead of Hiroshima, this is also a story of a love affair though instead of a married French woman and Japanese man, it is a married Japanese mother and a half Russian, half Japanese young man (said to be around university age). There is also a key death in the woman’s past that makes up a major part of the narrative, but Love at Six Thousand Degrees stands strongly as it’s own story and those unfamiliar with the movie will not feel slighted (though I highly recommend seeing it). Some of the dialogue reminds me of the cadence of film as well, especially early on as the pair collaborate to tell of their traumas, often with the other making assumptions and telling it to them as a way of creating their biography. Kashimada creates a very stylized novel that may rub some readers as cumbersome, though I found that so much of the style and themes inform each other. The dialogue style here represents the way the ‘contour that define’ them are melting away and their shared passive nature is blending into one. ‘You and me, we can be like anyone. It’s always the other person who decides who we are,’ they say, acknowledging that they are both passive people, ‘we don’t have the power to resist, even if resisting would be what’s best for them too.’ More on that in a bit, however.
The statue in Nagasaki Peace Park, which figures into the novel.’
The story, which begins on August 9th, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki (her trip concludes on the 15th: the anniversary announcing surrender) proceeds less as a linear tale but as spiraling through repetition of several primary ideas, events, and themes. It is like someone trying to talk through something, knowing there is something there and turning the ideas over and over until the truth falls out. Everything feels highly symbolic yet also obfuscated leading her to think ‘It isn’t meaningless. No, it’s filled with too many meanings. Those meanings keep rolling over each other in turns, never settling,’ and acknowledging that there is too much going on in everything to affix a specific meaning as ‘if you decide on just one meaning, you deny everything else.’ Which applies to much of the novel itself, and there are countless lines that scream out multifaceted symbolism that I found myself constantly underlining for both the beauty of the sentences (translated by Haydn Trowell) and to return to as I attempted to unravel each theme.
‘When my brother died, the existence in which we had so blindly believed died with him. My brother died and I lived.’
While one thread is the bombing of Nagasaki and how that reverberates through generations, the woman has her own personal moment of death: the suicide of her alcoholic brother. His loss has shaken up her world, one that was built entirely around him as coached by her mother who she knows loved the brother much more than her. Even her impression of herself was reflected to her through her brother:
Living life without a defined sense of self, she lives a bad faith existence allowing men to define her—which is often sexual, abusive and for their pleasure instead of hers. ‘I manage to survive day-to-day by giving a false sense of order to the disorder, by lulling myself into a momentary sense of security. By relying on a man whom I may or may not even like. Being out with men makes her feel queasy and uncomfortable (there is a brief moment hinting at repressed queer possibilities), but it allows a sense of self. She eventually marries a man who is understanding and gives her space, but she still feels unfulfilled and haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud. This leads to looking at the youth, who also allows himself to be pushed around and defined by her. She is cruel to him and though they sleep together, it isn’t very satisfying, with her frustrated by his lack of being forceful with her. However, it gives her a release. ‘The boundaries between them had disappeared. Two bodies reduced to one. Not life, but death. Not even love. Merely a process of amalgamation.’ By losing herself, perhaps she is able to better see and define herself for herself.
‘My past is rootless. My impressions change from one to the next. No sooner do they summon joy than they turn to pain. No sooner do they seem comfortably pale than they become blindingly vivid.’
One of the most interesting stylistic choices is the way the narrative goes back and forth between third and first person. This shows the interplay of public and private personas and touches on how the woman is attempting to see outside herself and find herself as separate from her brother. Having wanted to be an author, she talks about how she would write a novel that was just like her, though not sure if her life was worth writing about. ‘I watch my own story from the outside, like a spectator,’ she thinks, ‘remarking that it seems indifferent to persuasion. Wondering who the author is.’ In this way she can read herself like a book, and while the interpretation is available, the actual novel is vague on if this is metafictional or not.
‘Joy and sorrow are both different kinds of suffering.’
The youth is an interesting character as well, given to weeping and low sense of self. His mixed heritage is part of his lack of having a definitive self (‘In Russia, they say I have yellow skin. In Japan, people say I’m white. Even I wonder what color my face is.’) but his history of embarrassment and harassment over his skin disorder has also stunted his emotional growth. I found this aspect to hit very close to home as when I was young I began to get a terrible rash that doctors didn’t seem to understand. After several years of testing, it was determined it was from ultraviolet light and I was made to wear sunscreen at all times. So here I was in elementary, pale as pale can be and my hards, arms and neck occasionally blooming with a red rash that itched so much I’d wake up covered in blood from scratching in my sleep. It isn’t bad now, I wear sunscreen only during normal times to wear it and only occasionally get it on my arms, but it really shaped my perspective of myself as a kid that I was some hideous deformed monster. So I TOTALLY vibe with this character on that, and enjoyed that aspect of the book as I hadn’t thought about this in years and was able to positively mull over it. But I’m getting carried away. The youth is a complex symbol in this book, one of his many features being the way the woman compares his body to Nagasaki itself with both his body and the city being the sites where she has traveled to degrade and find herself:
She contines to compare him to the statues of saints destroyed in the bombing, the ones they see at the Urakami Cathedral, saying his parts are perhaps piled up in some intentional way. ‘But I can’t understand their meaning. I call that state Nagasaki. And that state is you.’
The Urakami Cathedral and the statue of Mary.
The church and the statues are highly symbolic in the story, with the statue of Mary with the eyes missing being both an idea of hollowness but somehow subverting meaninglessness to be a vague symbol just out of reach. Being Japanese Orthodox herself, Kashimada infuses that and Russian Orthodox (via the youth) into the novel. The youth, not just an expression of Nagasaki itself, starts to take on a Christlike symbolism, covered in frankincense, holding her back from a cliff (paralleling her brother jumping from a ledge to his death with nobody there to stop him), and beggars and dogs flock to him. Yet he is also the idea of Sainthood representing the Holy Fool which Kashimada examines in the novel, and his kindness to the woman in the face of her cruelty shows ‘the forgiveness of a Holy Fool.’ She has him read the resurrection of Lazarus to her, citing Sonya reading it to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment as the turning point where he turns himself in.
‘She had come here to witness death, to attune herself to it.’
Resurrection becomes a major theme, both of the self and the city from destruction. But memory is key too:
It all begins to spiral into the zones of discomfort we must confront in order to grow, and we see how history and mass devastation can flatten victims into one yet also how the woman wishes to find a sense of individuality from it all. The novel seems to make the case that something can be more than one thing, using the etymology of passion as an example: ‘the word passion was somehow derived from suffering? I wonder how that happened. Is a passionate person someone who has suffered? Maybe passions are a form of injury?’
‘There is a book in my mind, its pages in disarray. I don't know my own ending yet.’
While occasionally a bit cumbersome and the repetition and cycles of trauma-addressing make for a slower going read (for 127pgs this felt much longer), Love at Six Thousand Degrees is quite a intelligent novel that contains multitudes all deftly interwoven. Kashimada addresses how giving voice to our suffering allows us to better understand and process it, and that we can have a resurrection of the self after our own destruction. While it may be a bit opaque, it is one that rewards rereading and slowing down to mull things over, and a brilliant collage of ideas comes to light. Worthwhile.
3.5/5
‘Faces. Faces. Faces. In the midst of all those burnt-out fields, everyone has the same face. Strictly speaking, there are no faces at all. They have all lost their faces to grief.’
Some moments in history send shockwaves across decades, some so violent it is more like shrapnel that still hurts long after. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are such events, killing an estimated between 129,000 and 226,000 people and casting a long shadow through time of our destructive capabilities. Maki Kashimada’s Love at Six Thousand Degrees, the title referencing the ground temperature when the bomb exploded over the city, spirals through existential wounds at both a personal and national level as an unnamed woman plagued by visions of a mushroom cloud suddenly leaves her husband and young child to visit the city of Nagasaki. There she meets a young man with whom she has an affair based on their mutual suffering. Winner of the Yukio Mishima Prize, and inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for the extraordinary 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima, Mon Amour with which this story has many parallels, this is a story of losing oneself in order to try and find yourself. Teeming with dynamic symbolism and eluding simple interpretation, Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a brief but complex story of memory and overcoming personal pains colliding with each other while being tossed on the waves of generational trauma.
‘Close your eyes. Pretend to be one more corpse belonging to this land.’
I love when books seem to serendipitously find us. I had just watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour and was scrolling upcoming Europa translations when I discovered this was to be released a week away. Fresh from loving the film that inspired it, I absolutely HAD to read it. Those familiar with the film will notice thematic and stylistic similarities here. Taking place in Nagasaki instead of Hiroshima, this is also a story of a love affair though instead of a married French woman and Japanese man, it is a married Japanese mother and a half Russian, half Japanese young man (said to be around university age). There is also a key death in the woman’s past that makes up a major part of the narrative, but Love at Six Thousand Degrees stands strongly as it’s own story and those unfamiliar with the movie will not feel slighted (though I highly recommend seeing it). Some of the dialogue reminds me of the cadence of film as well, especially early on as the pair collaborate to tell of their traumas, often with the other making assumptions and telling it to them as a way of creating their biography. Kashimada creates a very stylized novel that may rub some readers as cumbersome, though I found that so much of the style and themes inform each other. The dialogue style here represents the way the ‘contour that define’ them are melting away and their shared passive nature is blending into one. ‘You and me, we can be like anyone. It’s always the other person who decides who we are,’ they say, acknowledging that they are both passive people, ‘we don’t have the power to resist, even if resisting would be what’s best for them too.’ More on that in a bit, however.
The statue in Nagasaki Peace Park, which figures into the novel.’
The story, which begins on August 9th, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki (her trip concludes on the 15th: the anniversary announcing surrender) proceeds less as a linear tale but as spiraling through repetition of several primary ideas, events, and themes. It is like someone trying to talk through something, knowing there is something there and turning the ideas over and over until the truth falls out. Everything feels highly symbolic yet also obfuscated leading her to think ‘It isn’t meaningless. No, it’s filled with too many meanings. Those meanings keep rolling over each other in turns, never settling,’ and acknowledging that there is too much going on in everything to affix a specific meaning as ‘if you decide on just one meaning, you deny everything else.’ Which applies to much of the novel itself, and there are countless lines that scream out multifaceted symbolism that I found myself constantly underlining for both the beauty of the sentences (translated by Haydn Trowell) and to return to as I attempted to unravel each theme.
‘When my brother died, the existence in which we had so blindly believed died with him. My brother died and I lived.’
While one thread is the bombing of Nagasaki and how that reverberates through generations, the woman has her own personal moment of death: the suicide of her alcoholic brother. His loss has shaken up her world, one that was built entirely around him as coached by her mother who she knows loved the brother much more than her. Even her impression of herself was reflected to her through her brother:
‘My brother has always been the person on the other side of the mirror. My perception of myself has always been relative to how I see him. I look at my brother first, and then by comparing myself against him, I know myself. That was how my mother taught me to perceive myself.’
Living life without a defined sense of self, she lives a bad faith existence allowing men to define her—which is often sexual, abusive and for their pleasure instead of hers. ‘I manage to survive day-to-day by giving a false sense of order to the disorder, by lulling myself into a momentary sense of security. By relying on a man whom I may or may not even like. Being out with men makes her feel queasy and uncomfortable (there is a brief moment hinting at repressed queer possibilities), but it allows a sense of self. She eventually marries a man who is understanding and gives her space, but she still feels unfulfilled and haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud. This leads to looking at the youth, who also allows himself to be pushed around and defined by her. She is cruel to him and though they sleep together, it isn’t very satisfying, with her frustrated by his lack of being forceful with her. However, it gives her a release. ‘The boundaries between them had disappeared. Two bodies reduced to one. Not life, but death. Not even love. Merely a process of amalgamation.’ By losing herself, perhaps she is able to better see and define herself for herself.
‘My past is rootless. My impressions change from one to the next. No sooner do they summon joy than they turn to pain. No sooner do they seem comfortably pale than they become blindingly vivid.’
One of the most interesting stylistic choices is the way the narrative goes back and forth between third and first person. This shows the interplay of public and private personas and touches on how the woman is attempting to see outside herself and find herself as separate from her brother. Having wanted to be an author, she talks about how she would write a novel that was just like her, though not sure if her life was worth writing about. ‘I watch my own story from the outside, like a spectator,’ she thinks, ‘remarking that it seems indifferent to persuasion. Wondering who the author is.’ In this way she can read herself like a book, and while the interpretation is available, the actual novel is vague on if this is metafictional or not.
‘Joy and sorrow are both different kinds of suffering.’
The youth is an interesting character as well, given to weeping and low sense of self. His mixed heritage is part of his lack of having a definitive self (‘In Russia, they say I have yellow skin. In Japan, people say I’m white. Even I wonder what color my face is.’) but his history of embarrassment and harassment over his skin disorder has also stunted his emotional growth. I found this aspect to hit very close to home as when I was young I began to get a terrible rash that doctors didn’t seem to understand. After several years of testing, it was determined it was from ultraviolet light and I was made to wear sunscreen at all times. So here I was in elementary, pale as pale can be and my hards, arms and neck occasionally blooming with a red rash that itched so much I’d wake up covered in blood from scratching in my sleep. It isn’t bad now, I wear sunscreen only during normal times to wear it and only occasionally get it on my arms, but it really shaped my perspective of myself as a kid that I was some hideous deformed monster. So I TOTALLY vibe with this character on that, and enjoyed that aspect of the book as I hadn’t thought about this in years and was able to positively mull over it. But I’m getting carried away. The youth is a complex symbol in this book, one of his many features being the way the woman compares his body to Nagasaki itself with both his body and the city being the sites where she has traveled to degrade and find herself:
‘Is it a human body that I’m devouring? Really? Isn’t it this state of being, this land…Nagasaki? It’s Nagasaki that I’m devouring. And you, no one, you…are Nagasaki…Maybe I’ll dismantle you. Maybe then I’ll find meaning.’
She contines to compare him to the statues of saints destroyed in the bombing, the ones they see at the Urakami Cathedral, saying his parts are perhaps piled up in some intentional way. ‘But I can’t understand their meaning. I call that state Nagasaki. And that state is you.’
The Urakami Cathedral and the statue of Mary.
The church and the statues are highly symbolic in the story, with the statue of Mary with the eyes missing being both an idea of hollowness but somehow subverting meaninglessness to be a vague symbol just out of reach. Being Japanese Orthodox herself, Kashimada infuses that and Russian Orthodox (via the youth) into the novel. The youth, not just an expression of Nagasaki itself, starts to take on a Christlike symbolism, covered in frankincense, holding her back from a cliff (paralleling her brother jumping from a ledge to his death with nobody there to stop him), and beggars and dogs flock to him. Yet he is also the idea of Sainthood representing the Holy Fool which Kashimada examines in the novel, and his kindness to the woman in the face of her cruelty shows ‘the forgiveness of a Holy Fool.’ She has him read the resurrection of Lazarus to her, citing Sonya reading it to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment as the turning point where he turns himself in.
‘She had come here to witness death, to attune herself to it.’
Resurrection becomes a major theme, both of the self and the city from destruction. But memory is key too:
‘If one has truly forgotten, if one’s memory is a blank canvas, from where comes that stubborn urge to paint over all traces of violence? From where arises that unconscious power of discernment that allows one not only to erase violence, but also to hide it from others?’
It all begins to spiral into the zones of discomfort we must confront in order to grow, and we see how history and mass devastation can flatten victims into one yet also how the woman wishes to find a sense of individuality from it all. The novel seems to make the case that something can be more than one thing, using the etymology of passion as an example: ‘the word passion was somehow derived from suffering? I wonder how that happened. Is a passionate person someone who has suffered? Maybe passions are a form of injury?’
‘There is a book in my mind, its pages in disarray. I don't know my own ending yet.’
While occasionally a bit cumbersome and the repetition and cycles of trauma-addressing make for a slower going read (for 127pgs this felt much longer), Love at Six Thousand Degrees is quite a intelligent novel that contains multitudes all deftly interwoven. Kashimada addresses how giving voice to our suffering allows us to better understand and process it, and that we can have a resurrection of the self after our own destruction. While it may be a bit opaque, it is one that rewards rereading and slowing down to mull things over, and a brilliant collage of ideas comes to light. Worthwhile.
3.5/5
‘Faces. Faces. Faces. In the midst of all those burnt-out fields, everyone has the same face. Strictly speaking, there are no faces at all. They have all lost their faces to grief.’
January 17, 2024
In the middle of preparing a meal for her husband and young son a series of seemingly minor incidents, a child’s question, an alarm set off in an apartment building, prompt a woman to abruptly walk away from her family and travel to Nagasaki. There she meets a man in a hotel lobby, younger than her, he’s Russian-Japanese; known only as ‘the youth’ he’s diffident and suffering from a skin disease that resembles the scars of the hibakusha (survivors of America’s atomic bombs). They begin an intense but fraught relationship, both sexual and emotional, presented in an experimental form influenced by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour but mingled with elements inspired by Kashimada’s ongoing fascination with Dostoevsky.
Like Duras’s narrative, this is a restless piece in which linear time is disrupted, ordered instead by the woman’s memories and emotions. It shifts too between first and third person, so that the narrator/writer and the character, fantasy and reality, become almost indistinguishable. Both the woman and the youth are lonely, isolated, haunted by their past and their difficult childhoods, both struggling to stay afloat. The woman has lost her beloved brother to suicide, something she finds almost impossible to process, leaving her with a form of survivor guilt that aligns with aspects of national guilt and trauma over the horrendous attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of WW2. The six thousand degrees in Kashimada’s title relates to the temperature of the ground after the atomic bomb hit the city. Kashimada also mixes in aspects of her background as a member of the Japanese Orthodox Church, questions of doubt and faith pervade her story.
Kashimada’s short but dense, complex piece won the Yukio Mishima Prize. The prose is a little too feverish for me at times, and I found the religious aspects extremely difficult to relate to. But at its strongest, it’s a moving, challenging exploration of individual and generational trauma, existential crisis and the weight of history both personal and collective. As well as an intriguing exploration of gender roles and family dynamics. Translated by Haydn Trowell.
Thanks to Netgalley and Europa Editions for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
Like Duras’s narrative, this is a restless piece in which linear time is disrupted, ordered instead by the woman’s memories and emotions. It shifts too between first and third person, so that the narrator/writer and the character, fantasy and reality, become almost indistinguishable. Both the woman and the youth are lonely, isolated, haunted by their past and their difficult childhoods, both struggling to stay afloat. The woman has lost her beloved brother to suicide, something she finds almost impossible to process, leaving her with a form of survivor guilt that aligns with aspects of national guilt and trauma over the horrendous attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of WW2. The six thousand degrees in Kashimada’s title relates to the temperature of the ground after the atomic bomb hit the city. Kashimada also mixes in aspects of her background as a member of the Japanese Orthodox Church, questions of doubt and faith pervade her story.
Kashimada’s short but dense, complex piece won the Yukio Mishima Prize. The prose is a little too feverish for me at times, and I found the religious aspects extremely difficult to relate to. But at its strongest, it’s a moving, challenging exploration of individual and generational trauma, existential crisis and the weight of history both personal and collective. As well as an intriguing exploration of gender roles and family dynamics. Translated by Haydn Trowell.
Thanks to Netgalley and Europa Editions for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
February 28, 2023
Short, tender, and existential novel about romantic and familial love. Wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style as it was very short and choppy. Plus the author did not use any quotation marks so it felt like one long drawn out thought. Quick read though.
February 10, 2024
This is a unique and odd piece of literature.
The story is told from two interlinked perspectives, an omniscient third person and a first person. The third-person narrative centres on a woman who abandons her family, whilst the first-person narrative delves into the same woman’s dreams of becoming a writer, her childhood trauma, and struggles with relationships and identity. The unnamed woman, a housewife with a young child, keeps thinking about the distressing atomic bombings of the Second World War. She ups and leaves to go to Nagasaki alone, without warning anyone. There, she meets a young half Russian man with whom she begins a finite liaison. They spend most of their time in bed and having philosophical discussions about religion, love, sexuality, family, death and life. Through the discussions and visits around Nagasaki, the woman delves into her past trauma as an echo of the atomic bombings.
The narrative is disjointed, jumping from one topic to another, and from third to first person, present to past, which creates a really confusing and surreal effect.
The story’s central themes are trauma, identity loss, emotional numbness, and the desire for connection amidst despair.
Some very difficult topics such as abuse, alcoholism, self harm and suicide are brought up quite casually which creates an uncomfortable atmosphere. The theme of Christian Orthodox religion is at the core of the book, with passages and characters from the Bible being discussed by the protagonists, and also heavy Christian imagery such as purity, suffering and sin.
The characters are difficult to connect to, the woman in particular. She is unnamed and we know very little about her other than the traumatic events of her past which makes it difficult to predict and empathise with her actions towards her family and the young man.
Overall it is a difficult read both in terms of the narration and emotionally. It would also be a difficult read to someone who isn’t overly familiar with Christianity. What I appreciated, was the story’s representation of the importance and effect of relationships, even temporary ones.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book for my honest review.
The story is told from two interlinked perspectives, an omniscient third person and a first person. The third-person narrative centres on a woman who abandons her family, whilst the first-person narrative delves into the same woman’s dreams of becoming a writer, her childhood trauma, and struggles with relationships and identity. The unnamed woman, a housewife with a young child, keeps thinking about the distressing atomic bombings of the Second World War. She ups and leaves to go to Nagasaki alone, without warning anyone. There, she meets a young half Russian man with whom she begins a finite liaison. They spend most of their time in bed and having philosophical discussions about religion, love, sexuality, family, death and life. Through the discussions and visits around Nagasaki, the woman delves into her past trauma as an echo of the atomic bombings.
The narrative is disjointed, jumping from one topic to another, and from third to first person, present to past, which creates a really confusing and surreal effect.
The story’s central themes are trauma, identity loss, emotional numbness, and the desire for connection amidst despair.
Some very difficult topics such as abuse, alcoholism, self harm and suicide are brought up quite casually which creates an uncomfortable atmosphere. The theme of Christian Orthodox religion is at the core of the book, with passages and characters from the Bible being discussed by the protagonists, and also heavy Christian imagery such as purity, suffering and sin.
The characters are difficult to connect to, the woman in particular. She is unnamed and we know very little about her other than the traumatic events of her past which makes it difficult to predict and empathise with her actions towards her family and the young man.
Overall it is a difficult read both in terms of the narration and emotionally. It would also be a difficult read to someone who isn’t overly familiar with Christianity. What I appreciated, was the story’s representation of the importance and effect of relationships, even temporary ones.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book for my honest review.
December 28, 2023
The story of a woman (a mother and wife) leaving her family on a whim. She goes to Nagasaki, meets a random youth and has a short lived affair, and tries to deal with issues that haunt her from birth. The story centres on how the woman's memories get triggered by the Nagasaki bombing, and how the national trauma of those bombings parallels her personal trauma. The exploration happens through the increasingly complex relationship between the woman and the youth she meets, and her own reactions to the way the youth reminds her of her own trauma, eventually helping her (maybe).
I must say I struggled through it, and the best thing I can say about it is that it was short enough for me to survive, despite thinking, dozens of times, I should stop. The main issue for me was the form that the novel took - the seemingly endless monologue, which actually is a dialogue, making it incredibly difficult to know who is saying what
While I appreciate the thought behind this form of writing, when it's not incredibly earth shatterringly good, it's just a post modem trope. I also didn't find the parallels and the links in the story particularly credible - not sure I bought into the relevance of the atomic bombing to the personal experience at the centre of the story. I also didn't really relate or could understand the personal traumas of the woman or the youth. Perhaps I was missing something, but what is more likely is that author didn't do a good enough job to convince me there was anything there to care about.
Overall, I cannot really recommend this book. While the voice may be unique, as per the blurb about the book, it is, unfortunately, not a particularly good voice at that. A strong pass. Even if you like outre Japanese literature - give this one a pass. Life is too short.
My thanks to Netgally and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.
I must say I struggled through it, and the best thing I can say about it is that it was short enough for me to survive, despite thinking, dozens of times, I should stop. The main issue for me was the form that the novel took - the seemingly endless monologue, which actually is a dialogue, making it incredibly difficult to know who is saying what
While I appreciate the thought behind this form of writing, when it's not incredibly earth shatterringly good, it's just a post modem trope. I also didn't find the parallels and the links in the story particularly credible - not sure I bought into the relevance of the atomic bombing to the personal experience at the centre of the story. I also didn't really relate or could understand the personal traumas of the woman or the youth. Perhaps I was missing something, but what is more likely is that author didn't do a good enough job to convince me there was anything there to care about.
Overall, I cannot really recommend this book. While the voice may be unique, as per the blurb about the book, it is, unfortunately, not a particularly good voice at that. A strong pass. Even if you like outre Japanese literature - give this one a pass. Life is too short.
My thanks to Netgally and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.
March 9, 2023
Soy tu lector, no tu psicólogo.
August 23, 2025
Tale of a woman who was haunted by the visions of a mushroom cloud that resolved her to abruptly leaving her husband and domestic life behind. She traveled alone to Nagasaki, a city that was marked by the atomic bomb carrying along the shadows of her brother’s suicide and abusive past where she later met a half-Russian young man and build an unsettling relationship with him.
Not a fan to the author’s style of writing and way it was structured— a shift in between first to third-person POVs that grasped me in confusion, so slow-burn and felt choppy. The brother’s story was executed in a trauma-based and grief so it gets me interested but the young man part—although still lurking with its emotional intensity—was tedious and a chore to finish. Appreciate the subtle meaning of the six thousand degrees that relate to the atomic blast temperatures and how it linked to the woman’s love and trauma’s episode. Would recommend only if you are drawn to experimental fiction.
Not a fan to the author’s style of writing and way it was structured— a shift in between first to third-person POVs that grasped me in confusion, so slow-burn and felt choppy. The brother’s story was executed in a trauma-based and grief so it gets me interested but the young man part—although still lurking with its emotional intensity—was tedious and a chore to finish. Appreciate the subtle meaning of the six thousand degrees that relate to the atomic blast temperatures and how it linked to the woman’s love and trauma’s episode. Would recommend only if you are drawn to experimental fiction.
June 7, 2025
oh this book was so surprising idk what i thought the story is going to be like but i was so pleasantly surprised and it's sooo so sad too oh my god i loved the writing style so much
December 7, 2023
While I appreciate the experimental style of Kashimada's writing and her philosophical exploration of parental abuse and fraternal suicide, and the correlation with the bombing of Nagasaki, I find the reading experience tedious and unmoving.
Had I known before requesting this how much religious iconography was part of the story I probably wouldn't have chosen it.
The descriptions of sexual intimacy between the unnamed protagonist and the youth she picks up at a hotel, the unexplained detachment from her husband and small child have a mechanical quality, rather like Murakami's, which is something I don't admire in literature. It goes further than the reservation I usually associate with Japanese writing and erases humanity and connection.
There is an interesting exploration of anonymity and the public persona and an ironic twist in the tail.
Publication date: 18th January 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #EuropaEditions for the advance copy
Had I known before requesting this how much religious iconography was part of the story I probably wouldn't have chosen it.
The descriptions of sexual intimacy between the unnamed protagonist and the youth she picks up at a hotel, the unexplained detachment from her husband and small child have a mechanical quality, rather like Murakami's, which is something I don't admire in literature. It goes further than the reservation I usually associate with Japanese writing and erases humanity and connection.
There is an interesting exploration of anonymity and the public persona and an ironic twist in the tail.
Publication date: 18th January 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #EuropaEditions for the advance copy
March 24, 2024
I was disoriented, fascinated, and entranced by this novel. Kashimada’s narrative blurs while it distinguishes. It definitely has given me much more to consider on some of my favorite topics: memory (collective and/is personal), suffering, death, and the self.
Read
July 3, 2025Read this on a train from Stockholm to Gothenburg. Didn't fit the mood at all! A story of the atomic bomb, a mature woman's sexuality and subtle themes, not so subtle, stacked and flowing from Crime and Punishment to Nagasaki.
I enjoyed the tiny essay of Raskolnikov and Sonya. And this part had it all, to me:
When I get drunk, I can laugh sloppily. I can hug my child naturally. I can joke with my husband. I consider myself truly fortunate. I have a vague sense of gratitude for something. I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My brother is at the end of that sentence.
Oh by the way there's a weird incest vibe here with hints of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai!
I enjoyed the tiny essay of Raskolnikov and Sonya. And this part had it all, to me:
When I get drunk, I can laugh sloppily. I can hug my child naturally. I can joke with my husband. I consider myself truly fortunate. I have a vague sense of gratitude for something. I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My brother is at the end of that sentence.
Oh by the way there's a weird incest vibe here with hints of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai!
Read
December 14, 2025I don’t really know how to rate this one. The way it was written was extremely chaotic and disjointed, but I think that was the point, although a lot of it probably went over my heard. There were some sections that really came together and hit hard for me though
March 18, 2024
I picked this up on impulse at the library even though I knew my Women in Translation Month TBR was already of truly ludicrous proportions, mostly because I was intrigued by the title and the fact that this had won the Yukio Mishima Prize.
Once I got it home I checked the reviews on Goodreads and YIKES! I almost put it back in the pile to return to the library immediately, but that Mishima Prize had its hooks in me, so somehow this ended up in my priority TBR for the month anyway.
Then I started reading, and I could see what a lot of the reviewers were saying. The writing is choppy, terse. There are no quotation marks. The protagonist is simply referred to as the woman. It is not always clear who is speaking, or what is speech, thought, observation, reflection...
And then on page 10, a single paragraph turned that all around. I was all in. (I will add the paragraph at the end.)
Listen. All of those things were purposeful stylistic choices, and maybe they work for you, maybe they don't. Most of the time they worked for me.
The woman is startled by a malfunctioning alarm in her apartment. She asks a neighbor to watch her son and gets on a plane to Nagasaki, obsessed with thoughts of the atomic bomb. Once there, she immediately falls into an affair with a young Russian-Japanese man at the same hotel, where she slowly begins unpacking a lifetime of suppressed trauma.
A meditation on selfhood, and trauma, and gender relations, and healing, and Christianity, and the different ways one can lose oneself.
The quote: "There are always bloodstains when you wrap someone's body with bandages. The same can be said for this woman. They aren't anything special. There isn't anything special about my bloodstains, about my loneliness, about my past, about the injuries and harm done to me by the men in my past. So if I were to write a novel, the protagonist would be a woman like that."
Once I got it home I checked the reviews on Goodreads and YIKES! I almost put it back in the pile to return to the library immediately, but that Mishima Prize had its hooks in me, so somehow this ended up in my priority TBR for the month anyway.
Then I started reading, and I could see what a lot of the reviewers were saying. The writing is choppy, terse. There are no quotation marks. The protagonist is simply referred to as the woman. It is not always clear who is speaking, or what is speech, thought, observation, reflection...
And then on page 10, a single paragraph turned that all around. I was all in. (I will add the paragraph at the end.)
Listen. All of those things were purposeful stylistic choices, and maybe they work for you, maybe they don't. Most of the time they worked for me.
The woman is startled by a malfunctioning alarm in her apartment. She asks a neighbor to watch her son and gets on a plane to Nagasaki, obsessed with thoughts of the atomic bomb. Once there, she immediately falls into an affair with a young Russian-Japanese man at the same hotel, where she slowly begins unpacking a lifetime of suppressed trauma.
A meditation on selfhood, and trauma, and gender relations, and healing, and Christianity, and the different ways one can lose oneself.
The quote: "There are always bloodstains when you wrap someone's body with bandages. The same can be said for this woman. They aren't anything special. There isn't anything special about my bloodstains, about my loneliness, about my past, about the injuries and harm done to me by the men in my past. So if I were to write a novel, the protagonist would be a woman like that."
June 7, 2023
“Love at Six Thousand Degrees” what does it mean? 6,000 degrees is the temperature felt when an atomic bomb goes off. The WW2 bombings in Japan were the death of many things as well as the catalyst for the creation of others. In this way, this unsettling love story does the same for our unnamed narrator, “the woman.”
The anonymous housewife, living in an unknown suburb, in one of many units in a large suburban apartment building, tells us she’s haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud, memories of her dead alcoholic brother and a misogynist mother. During her sudden escape to Nagasaki, she has an affair with a half-Russian, half-Japanese young man who suffers from severe skin allergies that resemble burn-like wounds all over his body. Having been abused in the past, she takes the role of the perpetrator with this meek young man. As their affair unravels, there are many references to things fusing and becoming new from death- plastic trinkets melted together from the bombs at the museum, her sexual experiences with the youth, their discussions on the Holy Fools within the Orthodox Church, the youth wanting to become one with her through love, marriage, and even physically by using her perfume.
I interpreted this in very biblical terms. The woman is plebeian soul, lost without god. The youth is a Christ-like figure. He takes her abuse to alleviate her suffering, he saves her from death, he wraps himself in Frankincense and is bathed by the woman in a caring way (like Mary Magdalen did to Christ), and finally, once she “confesses” her sins to him, in a church, she feels reborn enough to go back home.
So what is this story about? Freedom through suffering. Life after death. Understanding that one is both good and evil, both the axe cutting the tree and the tree turned to wood.
This was an odd read I’d like to try again once I read or watch Hiroshima Mon amour.
The anonymous housewife, living in an unknown suburb, in one of many units in a large suburban apartment building, tells us she’s haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud, memories of her dead alcoholic brother and a misogynist mother. During her sudden escape to Nagasaki, she has an affair with a half-Russian, half-Japanese young man who suffers from severe skin allergies that resemble burn-like wounds all over his body. Having been abused in the past, she takes the role of the perpetrator with this meek young man. As their affair unravels, there are many references to things fusing and becoming new from death- plastic trinkets melted together from the bombs at the museum, her sexual experiences with the youth, their discussions on the Holy Fools within the Orthodox Church, the youth wanting to become one with her through love, marriage, and even physically by using her perfume.
I interpreted this in very biblical terms. The woman is plebeian soul, lost without god. The youth is a Christ-like figure. He takes her abuse to alleviate her suffering, he saves her from death, he wraps himself in Frankincense and is bathed by the woman in a caring way (like Mary Magdalen did to Christ), and finally, once she “confesses” her sins to him, in a church, she feels reborn enough to go back home.
So what is this story about? Freedom through suffering. Life after death. Understanding that one is both good and evil, both the axe cutting the tree and the tree turned to wood.
This was an odd read I’d like to try again once I read or watch Hiroshima Mon amour.
June 3, 2023
I normally like these sort of sparse contemporary Japanese novels, but I'm wondering if it's a translation issue for me-- this is the second book I've read translated by the same person (different author) and been thrown off/frustrated with. Especially considering that this novel won a Mishima prize, I feel like I'm missing something.
May 22, 2025
The plot of this novel is straightforward but the sequence is convoluted. We follow an unnamed homemaker in Japan fleeing from her home after a fake fire alarm. She packs her bag, leaves her son with a neighbour and also her husband in the process, suddenly but deliberately- as if woken from a stupor. She then goes to Nagasaki and has a brief affair with a half-Japanese and half-Russian young man (whose name is the only one we are told in the entire novel, that too towards the end). This story is told through alternating narratives - the story of this woman interspersed with the voice of a first-person female narrator talking about the childhood trauma of her mother preferring her alcoholic brother over her and then her eventually losing him to alcohol. And sometimes it’s hard to differentiate the narratives - they merge and split on a whim.
I don’t know what exactly didn’t work for me - but I was lost throughout the book with just glimpses of beautiful writing (when she talks about watching her brother read and not drink for the days he spent reading the book - because how beautiful and true is the power of words; but also is that realistic?). It’s the kind of book I probably would have enjoyed more when I was younger - romantic about interpreting traumas and love and heartbreak as shattered pieces of shimmering glass. Now I find it a bit pretentious and unrealised. I found myself rolling my eyes at times - which is sad because at the end of the day I never want to disparage what I think is a feminist attempt to explain what the life of a woman means to her, as she exists as distinct versions to different people. I kept hearing people talk about how unsettling the novel was. But is it? I thought some things were quite regressive and painfully problematic (the youth being called “mixed race” and the author’s style of using race and rape as metaphors to explore power dynamics. Also so many religious Christian symbols!! Having said that I am also reminded to check my ✨context✨ because it was published in Japan twenty years ago. All said and done, I didn’t love the book and probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
I don’t know what exactly didn’t work for me - but I was lost throughout the book with just glimpses of beautiful writing (when she talks about watching her brother read and not drink for the days he spent reading the book - because how beautiful and true is the power of words; but also is that realistic?). It’s the kind of book I probably would have enjoyed more when I was younger - romantic about interpreting traumas and love and heartbreak as shattered pieces of shimmering glass. Now I find it a bit pretentious and unrealised. I found myself rolling my eyes at times - which is sad because at the end of the day I never want to disparage what I think is a feminist attempt to explain what the life of a woman means to her, as she exists as distinct versions to different people. I kept hearing people talk about how unsettling the novel was. But is it? I thought some things were quite regressive and painfully problematic (the youth being called “mixed race” and the author’s style of using race and rape as metaphors to explore power dynamics. Also so many religious Christian symbols!! Having said that I am also reminded to check my ✨context✨ because it was published in Japan twenty years ago. All said and done, I didn’t love the book and probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
December 11, 2024
In a small apartment complex - an ordinary housewife, haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud, abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel to Nagasaki, where she meets and has a peculiar relationship with a mixed-race youth.
This book is short yet dense - loaded with the mundanity of everyday life and moments of introspection, one follows how the death of her brother affects the woman. When two lonely and self-absent souls encounter, Kashimada is able to boldly explore generational trauma, existential crisis, love, violence, suffering and death. From religion to sexuality to mental illness, the story invites one to slip into a state of mental degradation, challenging the reader to find a motivation to live amidst the chaotic suffering and emptiness.
There's so much sorrow and despair embedded in the pages, which the process of dismantling the characters (or also the reader) turn into impending episodes of mind sounds. The abstract tone and feverish prose provide plenty of tension, yet it can also feel mostly unreasonable. The author incorporates some literary and historical references in the narrative to add a more realistic touch to what feels like quite volatile.
"Nothingness speaks."
How to love? Utterly somber, LOVE AT SIX THOUSAND DEGREES (tr. Haydn Trowell) - Winner of the Mishima Yukio Prize - is not for those searching for a resolution, rather it might work better for readers committed to the depths of psychological analysis. While it often went over my head, this Japanese literature offers a distinct reading experience.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Europa Editions . All opinions are my own ]
This book is short yet dense - loaded with the mundanity of everyday life and moments of introspection, one follows how the death of her brother affects the woman. When two lonely and self-absent souls encounter, Kashimada is able to boldly explore generational trauma, existential crisis, love, violence, suffering and death. From religion to sexuality to mental illness, the story invites one to slip into a state of mental degradation, challenging the reader to find a motivation to live amidst the chaotic suffering and emptiness.
There's so much sorrow and despair embedded in the pages, which the process of dismantling the characters (or also the reader) turn into impending episodes of mind sounds. The abstract tone and feverish prose provide plenty of tension, yet it can also feel mostly unreasonable. The author incorporates some literary and historical references in the narrative to add a more realistic touch to what feels like quite volatile.
"Nothingness speaks."
How to love? Utterly somber, LOVE AT SIX THOUSAND DEGREES (tr. Haydn Trowell) - Winner of the Mishima Yukio Prize - is not for those searching for a resolution, rather it might work better for readers committed to the depths of psychological analysis. While it often went over my head, this Japanese literature offers a distinct reading experience.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Europa Editions . All opinions are my own ]
January 21, 2024
I was reading story of a phantom, a woman who's life was so 'depend' on the past, unable or even resists to restructure herself from her trauma. After her brother suicide, she clings to the idea that her existence is a mere residue. As if everything she did always link to her brother's action, not just after the tragedy but long before. Starting from her mother's favoritism over the brother figure, she learnt that:
"She made me in the image of my brother, but she didn’t need me with the same compulsive necessity that she had for him. I was an empty likeness of him. My mother assigned something to him and nothing to me. Unconsciously."
This early neglected come as her first realization of being. Soon, she grow obsessed with her brother. Then the tragedy happened, the perplexility hits her. Hence, the result is someone with very tormented self-image. Despite the title of this book referred to heat of atomic bom once touch the ground of Nagasaki, and soon embodied main character affair with the Youth, I suppose, it resonates more with the woman relationship towards herself.
I didn't expect that I will put so much fondness over Maki Kashimada writing style. I love the way she pinpoints this event of losing identity over traumatic event as something so mediocre yet overturn. Maki Kashimada was using the element of orthodox church, Russian folktales, and atomic tragedy in Nagasaki as a frame of this story that is so compelling to read. I might reread this novella for character study in the future.
"She made me in the image of my brother, but she didn’t need me with the same compulsive necessity that she had for him. I was an empty likeness of him. My mother assigned something to him and nothing to me. Unconsciously."
This early neglected come as her first realization of being. Soon, she grow obsessed with her brother. Then the tragedy happened, the perplexility hits her. Hence, the result is someone with very tormented self-image. Despite the title of this book referred to heat of atomic bom once touch the ground of Nagasaki, and soon embodied main character affair with the Youth, I suppose, it resonates more with the woman relationship towards herself.
I didn't expect that I will put so much fondness over Maki Kashimada writing style. I love the way she pinpoints this event of losing identity over traumatic event as something so mediocre yet overturn. Maki Kashimada was using the element of orthodox church, Russian folktales, and atomic tragedy in Nagasaki as a frame of this story that is so compelling to read. I might reread this novella for character study in the future.
April 5, 2025
A woman who really should have gone to therapy instead suddenly walks away from her husband and child to travel to Nagasaki because the malfunctioning building alarm brought to mind a mushroom cloud. While there she hooks up with a young man referred to as the "youth" and possibly finds some sort of catharsis left by her unpleasant, co-dependent mother and her deceased by suicide alcoholic brother. Or something. I'm not entirely sure, to be honest.
I got the gist of what the author was trying to describe. Because her mother made sure everything revolved around her ill brother, relating to her daughter only by how she wasn't him, when he killed himself the center of their family unraveled and the woman found herself empty of self. She then tried to find herself in relation to other men, but none of them filled the same role as her brother, allowing her to find herself in their reflection. At least I think that's what was going on. The prose is pretty tortured and difficult. She settles into a good, normal life with a husband and son and at the start of the book snaps and leaves.
The whole of the book is her using the "youth" to work through her feelings and thoughts, essentially, without feeling or clear thought. And there's a lot of talk about religion and saints, specifically in Russian Orthodox Christianity.
It felt too much like an intellectual exercise to me, with very vague and confusing prose. It just didn't work for me.
I got the gist of what the author was trying to describe. Because her mother made sure everything revolved around her ill brother, relating to her daughter only by how she wasn't him, when he killed himself the center of their family unraveled and the woman found herself empty of self. She then tried to find herself in relation to other men, but none of them filled the same role as her brother, allowing her to find herself in their reflection. At least I think that's what was going on. The prose is pretty tortured and difficult. She settles into a good, normal life with a husband and son and at the start of the book snaps and leaves.
The whole of the book is her using the "youth" to work through her feelings and thoughts, essentially, without feeling or clear thought. And there's a lot of talk about religion and saints, specifically in Russian Orthodox Christianity.
It felt too much like an intellectual exercise to me, with very vague and confusing prose. It just didn't work for me.
March 7, 2023
'You are disorder, just like me. You'll devour my body, and in the end, you'll abandon me.'
A short but incredibly powerful novel from the author of 'Touring the Land of the Dead'. A woman abandons her husband and child and goes to Nagasaki, where she starts an affair with a younger man she meets in her hotel. They talk, go out visiting places in Nagasaki - both together and separately - and then they end the affair, the woman returning to her family.
This is one of those books that will polarise opinion. Nothing much happens, and there is a lot of talking. There are no quotation marks, and the narrative perspective shifts from third-person to first-person. The whole feeling is more a philosophical musing on gender, identity, family and society as a whole. Many readers will get frustrated at the self-absorption of the two main characters, but equally others will marvel at the compact, lyrical writing, wonderfully translated by Haydn Trowell. There are intricate layers of meaning and points of reference, the novel being in various parts an homage to 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour', a love letter to Russian literature - one of Kashimada's passions - and fascinating diversions on Japanese Orthodox religion.
Powerful, intimate, beautifully written, this is a sublime novel that will be one of my read's of the year, for sure. Absolutely 5 stars.
A short but incredibly powerful novel from the author of 'Touring the Land of the Dead'. A woman abandons her husband and child and goes to Nagasaki, where she starts an affair with a younger man she meets in her hotel. They talk, go out visiting places in Nagasaki - both together and separately - and then they end the affair, the woman returning to her family.
This is one of those books that will polarise opinion. Nothing much happens, and there is a lot of talking. There are no quotation marks, and the narrative perspective shifts from third-person to first-person. The whole feeling is more a philosophical musing on gender, identity, family and society as a whole. Many readers will get frustrated at the self-absorption of the two main characters, but equally others will marvel at the compact, lyrical writing, wonderfully translated by Haydn Trowell. There are intricate layers of meaning and points of reference, the novel being in various parts an homage to 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour', a love letter to Russian literature - one of Kashimada's passions - and fascinating diversions on Japanese Orthodox religion.
Powerful, intimate, beautifully written, this is a sublime novel that will be one of my read's of the year, for sure. Absolutely 5 stars.
March 25, 2025
To be fair. At first I wanted to give this 3 stars because some parts are actualy relevant to the story and quite interesting BUT I'm sorry, I just couldn't. Even if this book is only 129 pages long, it was still wayyy too long for what it was so desperatly trying to convey.
She's sad and feels that her life is unfulfilled and feels she's *completly* alone and miserable (she's not, she won't admit it cause it's just so much better to just drown in sadness!). He's also sad AND got litteraly raped by a drunk woman but yk what, it's fine, he couldn't be bothered, because now he's in love? (whatever...)
It gets so boring. They sleep together, they wake up, they eat, they go to a random place, our beloved main character somehow finds a reason to be annoying, she gets back to the hotel, tries to fall asleep but she can't and decides to drink beer...And they make love again. I GET IT.
And at the same time (I don't even know how) too much was going on. I know this is a novel and it has to show diversity in themes to create meaning but the author had really no business mixing religion, post-war Nagasaki, love, the Holy Fools, lust, the brother, the monks, etc.
Just to end my long ragebait moment on a positive note: So many references of eastern orthodoxy and yet these characters can't bring themselves to seek God's help.
She's sad and feels that her life is unfulfilled and feels she's *completly* alone and miserable (she's not, she won't admit it cause it's just so much better to just drown in sadness!). He's also sad AND got litteraly raped by a drunk woman but yk what, it's fine, he couldn't be bothered, because now he's in love? (whatever...)
It gets so boring. They sleep together, they wake up, they eat, they go to a random place, our beloved main character somehow finds a reason to be annoying, she gets back to the hotel, tries to fall asleep but she can't and decides to drink beer...And they make love again. I GET IT.
And at the same time (I don't even know how) too much was going on. I know this is a novel and it has to show diversity in themes to create meaning but the author had really no business mixing religion, post-war Nagasaki, love, the Holy Fools, lust, the brother, the monks, etc.
Just to end my long ragebait moment on a positive note: So many references of eastern orthodoxy and yet these characters can't bring themselves to seek God's help.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 14, 2025
Prirovnať toto dielo k Hirošime, mojej láske je asi najlepšie možné prirovnanie, pretože Love at Six thousand degrees je pocitovou záplavou slov a súvetí. Vyprázdnený naratív nahrádzajú pocity, zastavenia, mikropríbehy a makropocity, ktoré sa neustále obmieňajú, vyvíjajú a upadajú. Hirošima, moja láska od Resnaisa je zase podobne ladeným filmom. Priznám sa, že knižný vyprázdnený naratív až tak veľmi rád nemám a od Kashimady sa mi predsa len o trošku viac páčilo Touring the Land of the Dead, ale to neznamená, že tá kniha nemá čo ponúknuť. Dynamika knihy je výborná a niektoré myšlienky tnú do živého, lenže zároveň sa ich nachádza na každej strane hneď niekoľko, čo čitateľovi zabraňuje ( aspoň v mojom prípade) čítať ju rýchlo. Je tam veľa zastavení, ktoré ešte viac umocňujú existenčné zúfalstvo a depresiu. A čítať takú ťažkú knihu v tejto dobe mi úplne nesadlo. Hoci som si jej čítanie v mnohých ohľadoch užil.
December 2, 2025
Incredibly intense, depressing and claustrophobic, the title and synopsis made me think it would be a rom-com with some light introspection about world war 2's impact on civilisation. I was so wrong. This follows a depressed alcoholic abandoning her family upon a whim, making several visits to a hotel room to conduct an affair with a half-Russian guy whom she loathes due to his pathetic nature reminding him of herself yet simultaneously loves feverishly and cannot stay away from. It's so heady and I had to put it down at several points because it felt like it was getting inside of my mind. There are so many deep themes in this, from the paradoxical nature of self-hatred whilst wanting to stay alive, depression, alcoholism, parental abuse, suicidal idealization, survivors guilt, identity, religion, PTSD, apathy, resurrection, death-drive, feminism, domestic roles, the effect of childhood trauma on relationship formation and more. It's so packed to the point it's complex and overwhelming. I definitely see how the bleakness and nihilism would put a lot of readers off and result in the low overall goodreads score. For me though it hit all the right niches, the disorientation conveyed the themes perfectly and it gave me so much to think about so I adored it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 5, 2023
This is a very stylised novella written in the third person and first person.
- The third person story tells of Mother leaving her child with a neighbour then running off to Nagasaki and having a relationship with the Youth. The writing is sparse and the Mother and Youth move around the stage like puppets. There are no speech marks so it’s difficult to know who’s speaking sometimes. Neither character seems to understand themselves, they just react on impulse.
- the first person story is told by a woman coming to terms with her brothers death and her mothers rejection of her. There’s some rather weird identification and othering of herself and her brother.
Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy reading this and the stylised prose really put me off. I finished it to write this review. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
- The third person story tells of Mother leaving her child with a neighbour then running off to Nagasaki and having a relationship with the Youth. The writing is sparse and the Mother and Youth move around the stage like puppets. There are no speech marks so it’s difficult to know who’s speaking sometimes. Neither character seems to understand themselves, they just react on impulse.
- the first person story is told by a woman coming to terms with her brothers death and her mothers rejection of her. There’s some rather weird identification and othering of herself and her brother.
Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy reading this and the stylised prose really put me off. I finished it to write this review. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
April 25, 2024
3.5 stars to be exact.
This is one abstract book. I’m not sure I grasp its essence but its hopeless vibe attracted me and so I finished the book.
I THINK it has a few themes.
One is the concept of death- the physical death and emotional death. But both death kill your self identity, kill your will to forge your own path or embrace your path.
The other theme is to live. One survives by being numb to the outside but has he ever lived? At that one crucial moment one will see inside himself if his strength is to keep loving or to die when possible.
Another theme is grief. How it lies dormant in you until something or someone comes along and flips the switch and you have to acknowledge your grief. Grief can also be transferred to the next person. I’m grieving so you should feel my pain too.
Like what I wrote above, not sure if i caught the book’s essence but i tried!
This is one abstract book. I’m not sure I grasp its essence but its hopeless vibe attracted me and so I finished the book.
I THINK it has a few themes.
One is the concept of death- the physical death and emotional death. But both death kill your self identity, kill your will to forge your own path or embrace your path.
The other theme is to live. One survives by being numb to the outside but has he ever lived? At that one crucial moment one will see inside himself if his strength is to keep loving or to die when possible.
Another theme is grief. How it lies dormant in you until something or someone comes along and flips the switch and you have to acknowledge your grief. Grief can also be transferred to the next person. I’m grieving so you should feel my pain too.
Like what I wrote above, not sure if i caught the book’s essence but i tried!
May 5, 2024
An unusual novel and for me Kashimada's writing style was very akin to some writings by Banana Yoshimoto & Ito Ogawa in it's short choppy prose. Love at Six Thousand Degrees follows a mother and wife leaving her family on what seems to be a whim, heading to Nagasaki where she has a brief affair with a younger man. As the story progresses it becomes clear that the woman's decision to head to Nagasaki was not really a whim after all and instead appears to be a trip to tackle the intergenerational trauma of Nagasaki's atomic bombing as well as her personal trauma and loss, facing her challenges headfirst rather than masking her wounds and pretending everything is just dandy.
Perhaps it's the translation but at times it was a little confusing as to who is talking/ whose perspective it is from.
Thanks Netgalley & Europa Editions for the ARC.
Perhaps it's the translation but at times it was a little confusing as to who is talking/ whose perspective it is from.
Thanks Netgalley & Europa Editions for the ARC.
April 16, 2023
Perheenäiti pakenee tavallista arkeaan Nagasakiin, sillä kaupungin traaginen historia puhuttelee häntä. Matkallaan hän kohtaa nuoren ortodoksisen japanilais-venäläisen opiskelijamiehen. Yhdessä vietetty aika Nagasakissa nostaa esille traumaattisia kokemuksia molempien nuoruudesta, mutta toimii myös parantavana kokemuksena. Kaiken taustalla Nagasaki, joka muistaa, mutta elää tätä päivää.
Olen käynyt Nagasakissa yhdessä ja yksin ja aina se koskettaa omalla tavallaan. Naisen ja miehen syvälliset yhteispohdiskelut eivät jaksaneet kannatella tarinaa, mutta onneksi taustalla on Nagasaki, joka vertautuu kahden kulttuurin rajalla olemiseen, iholla näkyviin jälkiin, menneisyyden kipeään painolastiin.
Olen käynyt Nagasakissa yhdessä ja yksin ja aina se koskettaa omalla tavallaan. Naisen ja miehen syvälliset yhteispohdiskelut eivät jaksaneet kannatella tarinaa, mutta onneksi taustalla on Nagasaki, joka vertautuu kahden kulttuurin rajalla olemiseen, iholla näkyviin jälkiin, menneisyyden kipeään painolastiin.
July 18, 2024
Instead of Barbenheimer, people should watch Oppenheimer, then read Love at Six Thousand Degrees. Maki Kashimada’s novella trails a woman mourning her brother, leaving her family behind to have an affair with a nameless youth in Nagasaki. What is grief? What is love? What is self? What is personal grief? How are we impacted by old, collective grief?
Translation is hard, alchemical. To the extent I had occasional challenges getting immersed in the sparse prose of Love at Six Thousand Degrees, I view them with skepticism because I was reading a translation, I do not think in Japanese. I had been planning to rate this book lower than four stars, but wow, it nailed the ending. Breathtaking.
Translation is hard, alchemical. To the extent I had occasional challenges getting immersed in the sparse prose of Love at Six Thousand Degrees, I view them with skepticism because I was reading a translation, I do not think in Japanese. I had been planning to rate this book lower than four stars, but wow, it nailed the ending. Breathtaking.
May 20, 2024
I seem to have gotten into a pattern of reading books about women in the middle of their lives (like me) who are passive and dissatisfied with their lives (not like me). This fits the pattern, although the main character does take the action to jump on a plane. It was an interesting study in loneliness and grief. I felt pity for the woman in the book, but I didn't really much empathy for her. I did not love the style, which switches back and forth between first person narration and objective third person narration, and I also didn't like the decision not to use quotation marks.
April 19, 2025
This book teaches us—especially women—to sort ourselves out first before jumping into a relationship with someone else.
Especially if you're still dealing with past trauma or stuck in a toxic, submissive relationship with your parents (especially your mom), it's way better to see a therapist than let something like a multifunction alarm trigger you into running off to Nagasaki and hooking up with some guy just to escape.
But overall, I still enjoy reading Kashimada—even if there’s something kinda ‘missing’ in the language.
Especially if you're still dealing with past trauma or stuck in a toxic, submissive relationship with your parents (especially your mom), it's way better to see a therapist than let something like a multifunction alarm trigger you into running off to Nagasaki and hooking up with some guy just to escape.
But overall, I still enjoy reading Kashimada—even if there’s something kinda ‘missing’ in the language.
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