Love at Six Thousand Degrees

"Only Ms. Kashimada can create this kind of world."—Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police (on Touring the Land of the Dead) An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud. She 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.