Treat was born and raised in New Haven, but has lived most of his adult life in Seattle, where he makes his home with his partner of nearly thirty years. He is the author of several scholarly books on modern Japan, and has recently completed his first novel, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House, a story of the Pacific Northwest when the AIDS epidemic arrived in the early 1980s. He is currently working a new project, Walk Run Crawl, the fictional autobiography of a stutterer who saves the world. He has taught at Yale since 1999.