'Love at Six Thousand Degrees': Slow burn affair unfurls identity and trauma

Author Maki Kashimada is well-known in contemporary Japanese literature for her experimental style and philosophical themes. As a scholar of French literature and a member of the Japanese Orthodox Church, Kashimada tackles issues of faith, transgression, isolation and belonging within her works, often finding ways to incorporate a global perspective into her typically Japanese settings. “Love at Six Thousand Degrees,” her first full-length novel to be published in English, is thus a fitting introduction to her work.

Kashimada loosely modeled the novel on Marguerite Duras’ screenplay for “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” a 1959 classic of French New Wave cinema directed by Alain Resnais. In the film, a French actress and a Japanese architect meet in a Hiroshima hotel, their passionate physical affair complemented by their intellectual connection as they engage in spiraling philosophical conversations. In Kashimada’s short novel, a similar premise and structure is revealed: An unnamed woman starts a physical relationship with a young half Russian, half Japanese man she meets in a hotel elevator in Nagasaki, their sexual connection underpinned by their ongoing metaphysical discourse that gradually reveals their mutual suffering.

She is a young housewife who impulsively leaves her young son with a neighbor after her vision of a mushroom cloud compels her to travel to Nagasaki, the city where the American military dropped one of two atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. It is also Japan’s most Christianized area, owing to the Roman Catholic missionaries who had frequented the city since the 16th century. While the woman struggles with memories of her older brother’s battle with alcohol addiction and his subsequent suicide, the young man she meets in Nagasaki battles loneliness from both his divided ethnic identity and his painful and disfiguring atopy. Kashimada also layers in conflicts with his Russian Orthodox faith, a religion that fascinates the woman due to her readings of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and childhood visits to a prominent church.

In addition to Kashimada’s literary and cultural allusions, an intriguing aspect of the narrative is her foray into metafiction. Early in the novel, the third-person point of view that opens the book suddenly veers into first-person narration, as the presumed author of the work breaks the narrative wall to directly address the reader: “Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. ... I would exhaust all my ideas in a single work. I would end up writing about a woman whose life, both past and present, is just like mine.”

Kashimada sustains this dual perspective throughout the story, the writer and her character taking turns with perspective. The shifts between the detached anonymity of the woman and young man’s story with the reflective, I-novel conceit add another layer of meaning; Kashimada’s narrative ploy is satisfying in its implications on identity and humanity’s search for connection through storytelling.

“Love at Six Thousand Degrees,” translated by Haydn Trowell, will not satisfy every reader with its at times overwrought philosophical musings, but it is a compelling novel that won the Yukio Mishima Prize in 2005. An apt introduction to Kashimada’s work, this book left me wanting to read more of her writings.