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Not all mirrors are made of glass. But under certain lighting conditions, glass becomes a mirror. I am not thinking of convex or concave surfaces, of a distorted reflection on a spoon, a glass half-filled with water, or the sun glinting off the hood of a car, but only of flat panes that at night, with light behind them, turn reflective.

Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country begins promisingly with the girl on the train reflected in the glass, her face superimposed on the magnificient mountains and the landscape. I was so impressed that, after reading only a few pages, and not returning to the book for a year or two, the image remained vivid:

‘Taken with the strangeness of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted-over window. A woman’s eye floated up before him. He almost called out in his astonishment. But he had been dreaming, and when he came to himself he saw that it was only the reflection in the window of the girl opposite. Outside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the train, transforming the window into a mirror. The mirror had been clouded over with steam until he drew that line across it. The one eye by itself was strangely beautiful, but, feigning a traveler’s weariness and putting his face to the window as if to look at the scenery outside, he cleared the steam from the rest of the glass.’

But the symbolism, or allegory, is repeated and overemphasized as a motif throughout the novel. What might have been more elegant, more poetic, would be to leave it as a passing remark, a single unforgettable scene, rather than exhaust it. The image of fog or mist on glass cleared and appeared the image of the girl is already powerful enough that readers would carry it with them; there is no need to press it ad nauseam. Perhaps it would have been better to let it remain brief and clean as a haiku, the tradition that shaped Kawabata’s anti-realist sensibility. He was not the last to use this imagery, and likely not the first. The effect of a window turning into a mirror lingers in literature well beyond him, and I began recalling other writers who returned to the same vision.

The first that came to mind was Roberto Bolaño in 2666, when Lola left for Paris and took a job as a night cleaner:

‘It told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning . . . For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company’s smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.’

In this instance, the poignancy is greater because we have already read of Amalfitano’s troubled relationship with Lola. Unlike Kawabata’s protagonist, who indulges in amorous fantasy and poetic, romantic projection (onto the young girl serving the sick man, onto women glimpsed as passing figures, while thinking of his country geisha lover, and leaving behind his family in Tokyo), Bolaño offers instead a sad understatement of what Amalfitano imagines Lola is doing. She is not a portrait superimposed on the Parisian night sky but a floating figure, spectral and weary. She is not tending to a sick man but a tired woman smoking, having left the man who is now lovelorn, caring for a daughter, and perhaps already mentally unwell, hearing voices.

In Mircea Cărtărescu’s version, in his book Blinding: Volume 1, the glass turns into a mirror for a lonely boy staring at his own reflection, voyeuring at the city if not at his neighbours. Here the protagonist himself becomes the subject of reflection rather than a female figure: a narcissist who will not die, but lives on as the living dead of his memories.

‘Before they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened off and suffocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ștefan cel Mare. The window usually reflected my room’s cheap furniture – a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The reflected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my reflection in the transparent glass.’

What is constant in the three excerpts is the male gaze. The first two are projected onto the female figure, the last onto the self. The precondition for these surrealist or symbolist reflections in glass is always the night sky and a lit interior. This trick of the eye can only emerge under artificial lighting. I begin to wonder whether such reflections on large panes of glass were possible before electricity, in a world lit only by candles—say, in Rembrandt’s time. And what might the night turning glass into mirrors have meant for individuals already alienated from others?

When I was in Kyushu almost two decades ago, visiting an old house open to tourists, I nearly fell from the second floor. The symmetry of the two levels, glimpsed through an interior window, gave the illusion of a polished floor above, so polished it seemed reflective. Perhaps my optical illusion was caused by an installation I had seen at Tate Modern in London: a dark pool of still, reflective liquid, like what I imagined raw petroleum to be. For a moment I believed I could cross the low parapet and walk forward. It was not my reflection I saw, nor anyone else’s, but a depth mistaken for surface. Perhaps it was instinct, or something like a guardian angel, that woke me from the illusion. The writers I recalled used glass to stage memory, desire, absence, solitude. For me it was not allegory but danger. Night turns glass into mirrors; sometimes it is only a trick of the eye, sometimes a vision of loss, sometimes a fall.