Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada

 

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.

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Love at Six Thousand Degrees 

Author : Maki Kashimada

Published Year : 2023

Language : English

Pages : 128

Genre : Literary Fiction

Age recommendation : 21+ 

TW : Suicide 

This is the kind of book where you need to read the blurb to make sense of the story. Sadly, I am not the type of person who reads blurbs before picking up or starting a book.

There is one major key in the blurb: the mushroom cloud. I will unravel it slowly.

A mushroom cloud is not only a cloud shaped like a mushroom, but also an iconic image associated with an atomic bomb. But this novel is more than a story about the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki—which is also the setting of the novel. Nagasaki seems to be part of the framework through which the author builds the story.

One day, a siren goes off at an apartment complex in a suburban city in Japan. A housewife, in the middle of preparing dinner for her husband and son, decides to rescue herself and her son while noticing her neighbors fleeing and trying to figure out the cause of the alarm.

The Housewife sees a mushroom cloud and abruptly asks her neighbor to take care of her son while she goes shopping for a while.

But she doesn't.

She takes a flight and checks into a hotel in Nagasaki. Coincidentally, that day is August 9, the same date the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki decades earlier.

The housewife, whose identity is referred to as The Woman, is a moderate drinker. After checking in, she decides to have a drink at a nearby bar, then returns to the hotel and accidentally meets The Youth, a college student who looks like a foreigner but speaks fluent Japanese. The Youth helps The Woman carry her suitcase to her room. They drink together, and eventually spend the night together.

Yeah, that escalated quickly.

Then there is another POV: the “I,” a first-person narrator through whom we can finally dive into the narrator’s inner world.

The Woman’s POV takes up a large portion of the novel. The reader watches the days she spends with The Youth. It feels almost like watching a movie: seeing their dance of conversations and sexual needs, but only from the outside, as if through CCTV.

They discuss many heavy topics, most notably religion: Orthodox Christianity, Japanese Christianity, Russian Christianity, angels, God, and glimpses of The Youth’s past. We learn about his atopic skin condition, which caused him to be bullied at school, as well as his Russian and Japanese parents.

Another interesting topic is how The Woman used to behave in front of men in the past.

The Youth himself feels almost angelic and shows very little emotion. The Woman treats him according to her own desires, sometimes quite harshly. Many times, she acts maliciously toward him simply to provoke an emotional reaction. But The Youth barely reacts. He often responds with a smile, as if nothing has happened.

At times, The Youth almost feels less like a fully developed character and more like a mirror. We rarely get access to what is happening inside him. He receives The Woman’s desires, questions, cruelty, and curiosity without giving us much of his own interior world in return.

At first, The Woman thinks that she and The Youth are essentially the same person, which is why they seem to merge so easily. They are both outsiders, ordinary people who resent the way the universe works.

But there is another interesting trick: the novel never immediately tells us that “I” and The Woman are the same person.

We simply assume they are.

Only gradually, through fragments of the first-person narrator’s past, especially her relationship with her brother, and later the revelation that she is married and has a child, does that assumption become increasingly convincing.

So even the identity of the narrator becomes something we have to figure out for ourselves.

When we read The Woman’s POV, we cannot really dive into her inner heart because the author gives us only crumbs of emotion. The conversations themselves don't help. There are no quotation marks in the dialogue between The Youth and The Woman, so it is very easy to slip into blankness and wonder, Who is speaking now?

There were several times when I had to reread an entire paragraph just to figure out who was talking.

The Woman is presented almost like someone being observed through CCTV. We see what she does, where she goes, what she says, and what she does to The Youth, but we are rarely allowed to simply inhabit her. This is probably one of the reasons I felt emotionally detached from her.

There are also large portions of Christianity throughout the book. There are discussions about angels and rituals or ways of praying that I couldn't fully comprehend. Both The Woman and The Youth share a connection to Orthodox Christianity, and these parts seem to function as an important backbone and symbolism for The Youth.

While in the “I” POV, the narrator brings us back to her past and allows us to understand her pain. She suffered trauma related to her brother’s suicide. Her mother was completely devoted to her brother, and in her mother’s eyes, “I” was almost irrelevant until her brother died. Since childhood, her mother had constantly belittled her and rarely complimented her.

There is a paragraph where the narrator says that, for ordinary people, a mirror can evoke feelings of inferiority or superiority. But she has gone beyond that. She stares blankly into the mirror, no longer giving the face she sees there any meaning, almost waiting for someone else to appear behind it.

Maybe her dead brother. Maybe her own shadow, yet somehow completely separate from herself.

Reading that, my heart was breaking.

As the plot progresses, The Woman repeatedly throws questions and acts of malice at The Youth. Sometimes he doesn't respond in the way she expects. Eventually, she realizes that they are different people and that they don't necessarily share the same values.

Every time The Woman brings up a certain topic or performs a certain act, it feels as if she is trying to “devour” The Youth.

I kept thinking of a caterpillar.

The Woman keeps shedding her outer skin, changing it, consuming The Youth again, and shedding again, until eventually she loses herself and reaches the point where The Youth no longer satisfies her “appetite.”

I know that describing The Woman as egoistic or predatory because of the word “devour” might sound harsh. That is not really what I mean. Their relationship is consensual. I see the devouring more as a metaphor for the process through which The Woman tries to understand herself.

The Youth becomes something she repeatedly consumes: his body, his reactions, his stories, his beliefs, his otherness. She even experiments with malice, almost as if she wants to find out whether she can become someone other than the person she thought she was.

“What if I am capable of being this person?”

And perhaps that is why The Youth’s submissiveness is so unsettling. He doesn't give her enough resistance to establish himself as a separate emotional world. He becomes a surface on which The Woman can test different versions of herself.

There is also something fascinating about the way the novel refuses to give us a clear “real” version of The Woman.

She behaves completely differently with her husband and family than she does with The Youth. So which one is the real her?

Perhaps the answer is that there isn't one.

The mirror passage suddenly feels important here. If she no longer needs the face in the mirror to represent a fixed identity, perhaps the novel is also questioning whether there is such a thing as one authentic self.

The novel seems to build many islands: trauma, Nagasaki, religion, sexuality, identity, death, Crime and Punishment, memory. But it refuses to build bridges between them. The reader has to swim.

I understand what the Author is doing. I just don't always understand what is happening.

And I think that is the difference between a book that is deliberately difficult to look clever and a book that is genuinely confusing because confusion is part of its construction.

This is not a book that follows the familiar pattern of “someone confronts her trauma, changes, becomes better or worse, and we root for the protagonist.”

If you have read Sayaka Murata, you might recognize the kind of absurdity or surrealism where you eventually stop looking for a stable anchor of reality. But this book is not nearly as surreal or absurd.

It is more like a carefully constructed maze of puzzles, with very few hints and almost no bridges between them.

The problem for me is that there is also very little emotional anchor. I understand The Woman’s trauma. I understand what she is trying to do. I can even appreciate the architecture of the novel.

But I didn't really care about her.

After finishing the book, I found myself Googling several things: What exactly is a mushroom cloud? Why six thousand degrees? What is the significance of the Crime and Punishment reference? And, most of all, what am I supposed to understand from all the Orthodox Christianity references?

There is just so much to unpack.

I understand the grand idea, but the reading experience baffled me.

It is one of those books where, after finishing it, I think the author is incredibly smart and incredibly brave—but my entertainment-thirsty brain is completely exhausted.

And somehow, I think I respect the book more now that I've finished it.

Not because I understood everything.

But because I realized that perhaps the book never wanted to build the bridges for me in the first place.