Maki Kashimada's "Love at Six Thousand Degrees" is a mesmerizing exploration of passion, longing, and the complexities of love. Kashimada’s lyrical prose and vivid imagery draw readers into a world where emotions are as intense as the title suggests. The novel intricately weaves together themes of desire and personal transformation, creating a narrative that is both deeply moving and thought-provoking. The characters are richly developed, each navigating their own emotional landscapes with authenticity and depth. "Love at Six Thousand Degrees" is a captivating and beautifully written novel that offers a unique and immersive reading experience. Highly recommended for those who appreciate literary fiction with emotional depth.

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.

I found this book a hard one to get into. While certain aspects of this story were interesting to me. Overall, I found the pacing to be off and struggled to feel invested in the story as a whole.

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 on 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.

This book was a challenge to read in the way that it slipped between 1st and 3rd person narrative frequently, and used very limited punctuation but as someone who has been a fan of 'new wave' literature since reading Duras at A Level I did enjoy the challenge despite not liking any of the main characters or their actions!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Love at Six Thousand Degrees.

I enjoyed the first tenth of this book. The writing is exquisite and heartwrenching, and it is such a beautifully constructed yet incisive look at depression and trauma. There is something to be said about the intimacy with which Love at Six Thousand Degrees approaches Nagasaki which reminds me of the intimacy that Oppenheimer, the film, approached the bomb. The writing took my breath away and I fell in love with the concept and how the writer used the film, Hiroshima Mon Amour as an inspiration while creating something completely unique.

However, that is the first tenth of the novel. I struggled to get through the rest. The writing is beautiful and well constructed, but I found I could only enjoy the beauty in it when I ignored what the words meant. There is a kind of rhythm to the writing but I found that there was something uncomfortable about the relationship between the woman and the youth. This is probably intentional, I know but I just could not enjoy the book. I wanted so badly to like it but simply could not and I find I cannot put into words why this is.

I usually really enjoy translated fiction but on this occasion, I unfortunately had to DNF this book after 25% as I could not connect with the story nor writing at all.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Generally I enjoy Japanese fiction, whether it's crime fiction or the more recent flurry of more quirky, cozy fiction. Judging a book by its cover, I made the wrong assumption that Love at Six Thousand Degrees would fall into the latter category, Instead it's a fragmented and rather drawn-out story of a woman trying to deal with her past trauma and marriage by running away and having an affair with a random younger man.

I realise this is an extreme over-simplification, but that was part of my frustration with Love at Six Thousand Degrees. It had so much potential to be more, considering the themes it deals with, in particular the collective trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still present in the Japanese nation's psyche.

Unfortunately Kashimada's style was too experimental for me, too repetitive and at times the dialogue was awkward and clumsy. I'm not sure if this is due to a challenging translation or if it's part of the author's style. I can understand that the novel appealed to it's native audience, but it didn't quite have the same impact for me. Although I did finish it there were multiple instances where I almost didn't.

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 <i>Hiroshima Mon Amour</i> 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 best, 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.

Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a small novel, but it is a slow burn. It is not the kind of novel that uses plot devices to take it forward. The book deals with generational trauma and explains how it is transferred from person to person and generation to generation. It explains that covering the wound with makeup won't let that wound heal. We haven't forgotten our past, even though we make ourselves believe that, and the past comes out, erupting at a moment we least expect. We have to confront it at some point and make peace with it. Maki Kashimada has written a dense, warm, and profound novel that explores trauma, forgetting, and reconciliation with the past.

The title and cover drew me to this book and the premise intrigued me. Unfortunately, my positive feelings ended there before reading. I found this quite a confusing read, the switching between narrative styles and the overall style of writing just did not work for me. I found myself having to go back and reread at several points and at that stage the book began to feel like work not pleasure. I read it to its conclusion mainly as its a short enough read but didn't gain a lot in doing so.

An interesting idea but it just did not deliver.

2 star

An utterly confusing book. The narration switches between first person and third person, there are no speech marks to know who is saying what, and the author rambles about lots of seemingly unrelated topics. One paragraph is about his deceased brother, another one is about Orthodox Church liturgies, and then about the nuclear attack of Nagasaki.

"There is a book in my head, it's pages in disarray." I think the author has several books in her head and their pages are definitely in disarray.

This is an award-winning novel so there must be a literary value there but unfortunately I couldn't find it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Europa Editions for an Advance Review Copy.

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 love reading translated books and looked forward to reading this book. However, I stopped reading the book at 47% because I had a hard time following the flow of the story mainly because of the lack of quotation marks. Which in turn made it difficult to follow and relate to the characters in the story..

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

Although this was short enough to be to my liking, I did not fully engage with the story or it's characters.

Kashimada chooses heavy topics, the bomb and it's effects on Nagasaki, the memory of the pain, the destructions still permeates. Suicide, the death of her brother also casts a very long shadow on her main protagonist and on her life. Her lack of identity meshes with the lack of identity of the lover she finds in Nagasaki.

While I was willing to explore the subjects raised, I was quit distanced by how it was written.

An ARC kindly given by author/publisher via Netgalley.

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.