A story from one of Japan's rising literary stars about memory, loss, and love, Touring the Land of the Dead is a mesmerizing combination of two tales, both told with stylistic inventiveness and breathtaking sensitivity. Taichi was forced to stop working almost a decade ago and since then he and his wife Natsuko have been getting by on her part-time wages. But Natsuko is a woman accustomed to hardship. When her own family's fortune dried up years during her childhood, she, her brother, and her mother lived a surreal hand-to-mouth existence shaped by her mother's refusal to accept their new station in life. One day, Natsuko sees an ad for a spa and recognizes the place as the former luxury hotel that Natsuko's grandfather had taken her mother to when she was little. She decides to take her damaged husband to the spa, despite the cost, but their time there triggers hard but ultimately redemptive memories relating to the complicated history of her...

WINNER OF THE MISHIMA YUKIO PRIZE 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.