Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism, and Japan

by John Whittier Treat

In 1986, John Whittier Treat went to Tokyo on sabbatical to write a book about the literature of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But once there, he found himself immersed in the emergence of new kind of Holocaust, AIDS, and the sweeping denial, hysteria, and projection with which Japan--a place where "there are no homosexuals"--tried to insulate itself from the epidemic.
Great Mirrors Shattered is a compelling memoir of a gay man thoroughly familiar with the Japanese homosexual underground, a man anxious for his own health and unsure of the relationship he has left behind in the US. It is also a highly self-aware analysis of Orientalism, which the author defines as "the Western study of everywhere else," and an exploration of how sexual identity conditions knowledge across cultures. Jump-cutting between such texts as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysantheme, Saikaku's The Great Mirror of Male Love, the writings of Roland Barthes, newspaper headlines, and his own experiences during a previous stay in Japan, Treat creates an intricately textured account of the problems inherent in how we "know" another culture. The questions of self and other, difference and sameness, time past and time present, America and Japan, are explored here with rare intelligence and unabashedly personal disclosure.
Great Mirrors Shattered gives us a brilliantly fractured reflection of a year in one man's life, and the first study of the sexual politics behind what the West has come to know not just about Japan, but any place Europeans and Americans have gone to escape the confining rules of their home cultures.

Genres: Japan, LGBT, Japanese Literature, Nonfiction, Queer

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

John Whittier Treat has published Pushcart Prize-nominated short stories in A&U Magazine, Jonathan and QDA: Queer Disability Anthology. His poetry is included in the 2017 anthology of Washington State poets, Washington 129. His 2015 novel about the AIDS pandemic in Seattle, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Gay Fiction award. In 2020 JMS Books published Treat’s novella about Provincetown, Maid Service; in 2022, Jaded Ibis Press will publish his novel about speech disability, First Consonants. Treat’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Out, and LitHub.

Reviews

[Wei Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently, Treat was my professor's professor. She was telling me how a lot of male American Japanese studies scholars were (are?) gay, and in an attempt to find an answer to why that is the case, I found myself drawn to this book. Gave me a lot to think about regarding my own attraction to Japan, as well as my own sexuality, which I have conveniently marked as bisexual even though I feel the term is still too neat a way of describing it.

Also, it's nice to read about what goes on inside the mind of a professor of Japanese literature. It gives me some comfort to know how imperfect and human everyone really is at the end of the day.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surely it was someone's job to spot sentences like this:

He was what Japanese men who want white men want.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 3 out of 5]

First time I read this was in 2001 or so.