Embedded Files
Cover for The Tale of Genji: Part II by Lady Murasaki. Typography designed by Gorey. 1959.
Origins
Origins
Like theatre, Gorey’s fascination with East Asian media and culture originated in his military days. During his time in the army, Gorey was chosen, based on his high IQ score, to intensively study Japanese under the Army Specialized Training Program. Although the program shut down quite quickly, it seems to be the origins of Gorey's love for Japanese literature. Later at university, the variety of material found at Harvard further fueled his love for Japanese art and culture. He loved Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji the most, often citing her as his second favorite writer and the book as one of his favorites. During his time at Doubleday Publishing, he was able to design the typography for the cover of the second part of the novel. He even named some of his cats after characters from that story, and according to San Diego State University’s collection of Gorey’s personal library, collected multiple editions of it. When asked about why he loved Japanese literature so much, he would say, “It is amorphic, with drift, with fluctuation in everything, but with an ineffable reality beneath it all, whereas Thoman Mann seems to me exhaustive without being convincing.”. He admired its ability to convey the human experience without being overly explanative. The more minimalistic approach to writing was a clear influence on his own work, his books often frequenting a sentence or two per page.
Philosophies & Affected Aesthetics
Philosophies & Affected Aesthetics
Another way he expressed his affinity towards East Asian culture was through his musings on philosophy, when interviewed he said, “My philosophy? I’m a Taoist, if I’m anything”. Interestingly, there has been academic literature written on how Gorey’s philosophy leanings were present in his writing. Andrew Spencer wrote a peer reviewed journal article about spirituality in children’s literature and covers how Gorey’s theory about how he writes his stories can be compared to Jung’s theory on how to read the I Ching (an ancient Taoist text).
His interest in Eastern philosophy could also be seen physically manifesting in his home on Cape Cod. His sizable collection of rocks could be considered to be the “surrealist’s idea of a Zen rock garden”. He had a strong attachment to these rocks; an author of one of his biographies, Mark Dery, suggests that the rocks were characters in the sense that they possessed individuality, and in another way, it falls in line with his assumed partiality to the “animistic sense of Japanese folktales”. Gorey also collected deteriorating objects, keeping a chest of metals to observe the process of rusting. Dery again suggests that this could be connected to his Japanophilia through its resemblance to the expression of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that finds beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. An unconventional view of objects that Gorey obviously favored as he generally collected things that had had a previous life, often frequenting garage sales.
Edward Gorey, cover of The Chinese Obelisks. 1970.
In his book, The Chinese Obelisks, the typography and overall cover seem to reference literati paintings. He uses a lot of negative space and the text runs vertical like Chinese calligraphy. Intriguingly, if one was to compare it to a literati painting, they would see that Gorey chose to invert the color scheme, making the majority of the composition full of black ink. However, the title and cover are overall deceptive as the story is instead an abecedarium of an author (a Gorey look-alike) going on a walk.
Inside the program for Chinese Gossip. 1994.
Edward Gorey, the cover of the program for Chinese Gossip. 1994.
Chinese Gossip, one of his Cape Cod plays, is like The Chinese Obelisks in which the actual material doesn’t seem to reflect the title whatsoever. From reading the program, it seems like a typical Gorey production featuring various unpublished short stories because the titles of the scenes don’t seem remotely related to one another. One of the titles, “Habakari”, if intended to be Japanese, translates to either hesitation, hindrance, or washroom. As expected, since the scripts aren’t published, we can only imagine what it was about or what it looked like.
Gorey was undoubtedly a fan of Noh and Kabuki, proved by his personal collection, and its highly stylized visual aesthetic bled into his work. There have been multiple times where Gorey has drawn or designed costumes in his theatre work that have resembled or referenced Japanese traditional dress and costume.
In Dracula: a Toy Theatre, Lucy’s character sketch is seen in a robe in act two; the sleeves long and block-ish with bat print hanging from the arm. The silhouette is very clearly a reference to kimono, including the loosely tied ‘belt’ that would be comparable to obi. It seems as if this design was made only out of aesthetic appreciation of the silhouette rather than a narrative reference.
Edward Gorey, Lucy's costume from Act Two, from Dracula: a Toy Theatre. 1979.
Omlet: or, Poopies Dallying and Rune Lousse, Rune de Leglets: Ou. Sirence de Glenouirres is another theatrical work that seems to feature a character in Japanese-adjacent wear. In the poster for this entertainment, there are multiple characters in peculiar poses, one that is lying horizontally towards the bottom of the composition is in seemingly floral printed kimono-looking robes with a topknot hairstyle. In this case, it makes much more sense as the story of Rune Lousse, Rune de Leglets: Ou. Sirence de Glenouirres is a parody of Madame Butterfly and the stereotypes within it.
Cover of the program for Omlet: or, Poopies Dallying and Rune Lousse, Rune de Leglets: Ou. Sirence de Glenouirres. 1998.
Inside the program for Omlet: or, Poopies Dallying and Rune Lousse, Rune de Leglets: Ou. Sirence de Glenouirres. 1998.
On one of the pages of The Blue Aspic, Gorey imagines Chinese theatrical costume as he illustrates a fictional operatic figure, Ortenzia Caviglia in the role of Tsi-Nan-Fu. The sleeves on the costume fall far past hand length, almost certainly referencing the flowy silk of water sleeves in Chinese opera. The costume is also overridden with large spots filled with calligraphy, which Dery proposes is a reference to tenkoku stamps, Japanese seals that inscribe a person’s identity. The background set is also reminiscent of the highly stylized ukiyo-e prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. The lone illustration is overall a “fond homage to the Japanese wood-block tradition he loved and a witty study in ironic Orientalism”.
Edward Gorey, Caviglia as Tsi-Nan-Fu, from The Blue Aspic, 1969.
Edward Gorey, cover of The Grand Passion: a Novel. 1992.
The Grand Passion is another title that utilizes references to Chinese traditional dress, but this time humorously mixed with Victorian and Edwardian wear as well. The novel is supposedly fifteen unrelated phrases with accompanying illustrations, apparently sourced from “Selected Phrases in the Conton [assumedly Cantonese] Dialect Compiled” a 1930 volume published in China. The various characters don a mix of bowler hats, Tang jackets, tailcoats, topknots, and much more. Again, these depictions read with an air of “ironic Orientalism”.
Edward Gorey, A newspaper spread of The Grand Passion: a Novel. For The New York Times Magazine. 1976.
One of the bigger Japan-inspired projects Gorey did was a theatrical production of The Mikado. His aforementioned wish to work on a theatrical production of a Gilbert and Sullivan show finally came to fruition in 1983 when his past collaborator, John Wulp, now a teacher at Carnegie Mellon, asked him to design for the university’s production. The show itself is set in an Orientalized Britain, it’s a “pointed satire, in kimonos and topknots, of British politics and Victorian manners and mores” (Dery 331). Gorey agreed to design as long as the show was kept traditional, true to Gilbert and Sullivan, meaning there wouldn’t be room for any gimmicks, a request which was later ignored. His costumes were a mix between Japanese traditional clothing and Edwardian costume. The sets were beautiful backdrops that depicted ukiyo-e style settings and also resembled the “delicate washes of English watercolorists such as Edward Ardizzone” (Dery 332). The sets and costumes were praised highly by reviewers, usually described as smart and visually stunning. However, as mentioned earlier, the production had gone against his wishes and departed from the source material; the actors spoke in a “cornpone twang … (in a bad way)” that was noted as contrasting heavily with the smart costuming and sets. The production is originally a Victorian comic opera, but it was transformed into a country-and-western musical. No one knows what Gorey thought about it as he did attend but never revealed his thoughts on it, not even to Wulp.
Edward Gorey, flyer for The Mikado. (Carnegie-Mellon University Drama Department.) 1983.
Edward Gorey, transl. Motoyuki Shibata, cover of The Hapless Child. 2001.
Edward Gorey, transl. Motoyuki Shibata, cover of The Doubtful Guest. 2000.
Impact
As much as Gorey was impacted by Japan, his work has also made an impact on Japan. Motoyuki Shibata, a former Professor of American Literature at the University of Tokyo, is a popular well-respected translator that took an interest in Gorey and proceeded to translate a multitude of his works. He is known to “not rely on anyone’s instincts but his own: he chooses the authors that capture his fancy and imagination and goes on from there, creating a market for them in Japan where, in some cases, there would not have been one otherwise” (Goreyography’s East). His interest in Gorey stems from how well Gorey’s words interact with his illustrations and vice versa, comparing them to movie soundtracks. Since 2000, Shibata has translated eighteen titles, including a book documenting Gorey’s interviews, Ascending Peculiarity, and a book made up of a collection of Gorey’s favorite scary stories, The Haunted Looking Glass. Shibata’s translations did indeed lend to a blossoming interest in Gorey’s work in Japan that would only increase with a traveling exhibition, Elegant Enigmas, that was shown at ten different museum venues from 2018-2019 further helping to share Gorey’s work with Japan’s residents.
Edward Gorey, transl. Motoyuki Shibata, page from The Hapless Child.
As a part of CITA (International Centre for Theatre Arts), Tatsuya Yasumoto made a theatrical film, posted on youtube on October 4, 2020, based on Gorey’s popular book, The Doubtful Guest. The film stays true to Gorey’s story as the narrator reads the same couplets over an enacted portrayal of a guest that unexpectedly comes and stays at this family’s home for seventeen years. In true Gorey fashion, the guest is a puppet, directly resembling its subject material. The puppet is about hip height and is controlled from behind, so the movement is almost humorously surreal like a lot of Gorey’s works. It all takes place in a more historical-looking Japanese house, the wooden architecture and shoji screens offering a different interpretation to the more Victorian setting in the book. While the film mostly focuses on the guest, there are some shots of the family members, and they are all dressed in more traditional wear including geta (traditional sandals with two teeth on the underside). Knowing Gorey’s enthusiasm of seeing his work put on by someone else and his love of Japanese culture, it’s easy to assume that he would have truly loved this work. This piece is truly representative of his legacy as a theatre-maker, and cultural enthusiast.
Edward Gorey, transl. Motoyuki Shibata, title page of The Doubtful Guest.
Clifford Ross, Gorey with the Doubtful Guest doll, New York City, 1958.
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