They consult I Ging, dabble in Buddhism, have their homes Chi'is tested and go in search of happiness at Sushi dinners or in Hollywood. The generation of today's mid-forties who set out to manage love, their families and their professions with so much more tolerance and coolness and so much better than their parents had done are now confronted by questions which cannot be answered simply by »positive thinking«. A young woman travels to Japan alone, hoping to instil new élan into her business. Luck is not on her side, however, and her contact man leaves her in the lurch. But her despair is caused not so much by her professional debacle as by her failing relationship with her husband: I even began reading the Dalai Lama and meditating in an attempt to save my marriage. Samsara: life is suffering. That did not exactly cheer me up. Following a road accident, Achim's wife Eva is in a coma. Achim visits her every day, reads to her and hopes for a reaction, but the doctors are at their wits' end. In an attempt to take his mind off the desperate situation, Achim gets swept along in the subway with a crowd of people on their way to a concert by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger has hardly taken hold of the microphone when Achim sees in his mind's eye Eva on their first journey together, and he hears them both join in singing with the band: satisfaction! This memory of the early days of their love gives him the strength to carry on. The fifteen-year-old Anna, whose mother is a food photographer, refuses to eat. She has to be artificially fed. Completely bewildered, her parents stand by her bed in hospital where Anna is being intravenously fed. If my jeans don't fit me any more I shall kill myself, thinks Anna in Germany in 1992. My mother doesn't understand that one's soul grows thin when one's body is fat, thinks the fifteen-year-old Anna in Italy in 1570 and decides to stop eating and become a martyr... In the alternation between the narrations, the alien and the all too familiar draw close together. Fifteen tragic and comic stories about yesterday and today which are not as far removed from one another as we sometimes think.