Great mirrors shattered
Subtitle: homosexuality, orientalism, and Japan
By: John Whittier Treat.
Series: Ideologies of desire
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: Homosexuality -- Japan; AIDS (Disease) -- Japan; Gay men -- Japan -- Sexual behavior; Homosexuality -- Japan -- Public opinion; Public opinion -- Japan
Description: 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 a 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 United States. 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-241).