He remembered how he wrote to his friend about small things he would see now and then, in the streets or elsewhere, on his way somewhere. Things that would only last a moment, then disappear, in pure loss. ‘Pure loss’ was what he then called the transient, where he saw beauty. Not knowing that their relationship had also been of a transient nature, in the end, pure loss, and that its beauty would reveal itself over thirty years later in Kyoto.

Unequal Loves is a luminous meditation on love, memory, and the quiet devastations of time. 

A middle-aged man journeys through Japan with his wife, drifting between Kyoto’s hushed temples and Tokyo’s incandescent streets, while traversing the more elusive terrain of his own restless mind. Encounters with art, literature, and fleeting strangers awaken buried desires and long-dormant regrets, pulling him into a reckoning with the ghosts of youthful passion, lost friendships, and the fragile intoxication of beauty glimpsed in passing. 

With prose that is both precise and tender, Xavier Hennekinne captures the ache of nostalgia and the gravity of the present. Unequal Loves is a profound and atmospheric novel, unafraid to linger in the silences between people, the impermanence of connection, and the bittersweet shimmer of what we almost had.