Book Review: Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada

 

If one has truly forgotten, if one’s memory is a blank canvas, from where comes that stubborn urge to paint over all traces of violence? From where arises that unconscious power of discernment that allows one not only to erase violence, but also to hide it from others?

A Japanese housewife has a sudden vision of a mushroom cloud while cooking. She abruptly abandons her husband and child and flies to Nagasaki. There, she meets a young Japanese-Russian man and starts an affair with him. Affected by skin issues, he is seemingly a weak person, and she believes she can torment him to get back at all her previous lovers who never took her seriously when she spoke about her difficult past involving an alcoholic brother who committed suicide after turning sober and an insane mother. But is it that easy to shed your soul of trauma, especially when you bleed not just for yourself but for others who are also affected?

Love at Six Thousand Degrees is the upcoming English translation of a Japanese novel written by Maki Kashimada and published originally in 2005. The English translator is Haydn Trowell. The book is the winner of the prestigious Yukio Mishima Prize, an award established in memory of Mishima, one of my favourite Japanese novelists. I received the book from its publisher, Europa Editions, through Netgalley in exchange for honest feedback.

The book examines the effects of generational trauma and works as an allegory for the traumatic effects of the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese society, the effects of which plague them even decades after the incident. The writer chose the deeply personal story of an unnamed woman to illuminate this subject. The six thousand degrees mentioned in the title are the immediate temperatures generated during the nuclear explosion. On the cover, we find a picture of a woman who has a mushroom cloud in place of her hair. Her pose very obviously reminds me of the images of the explosion.

The writer begins the story in the third person and then suddenly shifts to the first-person narration by the unnamed woman. She reveals her wish to write a book and declares that she can write only her own tale, following which she starts recounting what we already read at the beginning. Curiously, in this story within, she addresses herself as a woman. The story proceeds in alternating first- and third-person narratives. We aren't sure if whatever is happening is the story of the woman or a fantasy that she is weaving.

The book isn't divided into chapters. There are no quotation marks for conversations. The dialogue just flows without many 'he said','she asked' interruptions. The present, past, passages about the explosion, the woman's thoughts—the narrative is like a soup of non-linearity. Ultimately, it creates an environment that confuses the reader, like something exploding somewhere near and everybody is running around without any concrete plan or method. Her travelling to Nagasaki and the exploration of churches and buildings that were destroyed in the nuclear explosion connect her past with the present, and we realise that it is her past, of a dead brother and a crazy mother that no one in her present bothers to acknowledge, that has erupted in her, causing the vision.

In the young man—half Japanese and half Russian—she finds herself and her weakness. His skin problems point us again to the descriptions of the burning skins of people during the nuclear explosion. The woman begins her relationship with the weak, tormented youth because she feels that she has to take out all the make-up that she applied to her body and soul in order to conceal the wounds from her past. Will this relationship help her to come to terms with her past? Will not concealing her weaknesses and her past allow her to live forward?

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.