acht Gesichter am Biwasee

Eight love stories set around Japan's Lake Biwa, each one a meditation on desire and loss. Dauthendey draws from a five-hundred-year-old Japanese artistic tradition, the 'Eight Views of Ōmi,' where painters and poets captured this sacred landscape near Kyoto in its most emotionally resonant moments. What emerges is a collection where every story unfolds at the precise instant when passion tips into longing or memory. The prose carries the stillness of still water, then breaks like a wave. These are not simple tales of heartbreak; they are investigations into how love transforms when it cannot be fulfilled. Each of the eight faces Dauthendey reveals is a different mask that desire wears, from quiet devotion to fierce obsession. The melancholy here is not weakness but clarity: these are stories for readers who understand that some feelings are most alive in their unconsummated form.