Love at Six Thousand Degrees: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

"Only Ms. Kashimada can create this kind of world."-Yoko Ogawa, author ofThe Memory Police (on Touring the Land of the Dead)

A 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 Russian-Japanese man.

Inspired by Marguerite Duras's screenplay for "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," this novel is an undeniable demonstration of Kashimada's distinctive voice, the polish and precision of her literary style, and her dedication to plumbing the depths of her characters' psychology.

Thrilling and poised in equal measure, dealing with the travails of history, with gendered identity, and with the tension between private and public selves,Love at Six Thousand Degreesis a literary highwire act by one of the most unique voices in contemporary Japanese fiction.

Reviews

'Kashimada's writing is exceptional.' - The Spectator

'An extended exercise in what it means to attempt to describe the indescribable.' - The New York Times Book Review

'A novel about learning to acknowledge bad memories rather than hide them away.' - Foreword Reviews

'While Kashimada's stories, like Murakami's, resist easy interpretation, the former revel in the beauty of experience, whether sorrowful or joyous, affirming life in all its strangeness, horror and mystery.' - The Times Literary Supplement (on Touring the Land of the Dead)

'Kashimada's allusive, outward-facing work insists on placing her fiction squarely within the context of world literature and thought.' - Literary Hub (on Touring the Land of the Dead)

Author Bio

Known for her daring prose style, Maki Kashimada is the author of Two, which won the 1998 Bungei Prize, and Touring the Land of the Dead (Europa, 2021), winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.Love at Six Thousand Degrees was awarded the Yukio Mishima Prize. Haydn Trowell is a literary translator who specializes in contemporary Japanese fiction, and the translator of Maki Kashimada's Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Touring the Land of the Dead (Europa, 2021). He holds a doctorate in translation studies and literary stylistics from Monash University, Australia.