The Pillow Book (film)

The Pillow Book is a 1996 film by UK director Peter Greenaway, which stars Vivian Wu as Nagiko, a Japanese model in search of pleasure and new cultural experience from various lovers. The film is a rich and artistic melding of dark modern drama with idealized Chinese and Japanese cultural themes and settings.

Plot

A Japanese born model in Hong Kong, Nagiko (Wu) seeks a lover who can match her desire for carnal pleasure with her admiration for poetry and calligraphy. The roots of this obsession lie in her youth, when her father (Ken Ogata) would write characters of good fortune on her face. In an Englishman, Jerome (McGregor), she finds the partner with whom she can share her physical and her poetic passion, using each other's body as tablets for their art.

Related Topics:
Japan - Hong Kong - Wu - Poetry - Calligraphy - Ken Ogata - Characters - McGregor

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After Nagiko rejects him, Jerome sinks into depression, and kills himself. His body is stolen, by enemies of Nagiko's father. Nagiko becomes distraught and seeks to overturn the coercive influences which had made her reject happiness with Jerome. She hatches an elaborate and original plan to use the bodies of the Englishman and her other (would be) lovers to exact revenge upon her father's publisher, who dishonoured her father with demands of homosexual favours in exchange for publication.

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The title, "The Pillow Book" is in reference to a kind of japanese diary, which in the story was made from the skin from Jerome's body, as an act of desecration. Upon recovering the "book" Nagiko writes a "pillow book" on it, telling of her story. She is revealed to have been pregnant with Jerome's child, and is shown in the epilogue reading to that child from the book.

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