The Pillow Book – (1995; Japanese and English) An elaborate, erotic, complex, cinematic narrative from writer/director Peter Greenaway of a woman’s search for the ideal calligraphy lover. Black-and-white footage represents the past; inset screens provide flashbacks, flash-forwards, and details; scenes of full frontal nudity, both males and females, are frequent. When she was a child, Nagiko’s mother read to her from Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, which would become one thousand years old the year Nagiko turns 28, a compendium of splendid, pleasurable things the author loved in her life.

On her birthdays her father wrote Japanese characters on her face while repeating a folklore story of how God painted the eyes, the lips, the sex, and the name onto each individual he’d created from clay and then if he approved of the work he’d bring the doll to life, signing his name on the back. Beginning with her sixth birthday Nagiko started her own pillow book, a diary of her observations. Not at first understanding a scene she’s witnessed between her father, a writer, and his publisher (Yoshi Oida), she would later realize the blackmail and humiliation her father endured to have his books printed.

After a disastrous marriage to a boorish man she’d met when she was six and he was ten – he burned her pillow book in which she began writing in English to hide her thoughts from his prying eyes, so she set their house ablaze – Nagiko (Vivian Wu) leaves Japan for self-exile in Hong Kong where she practices the Mandarin Chinese her mother had taught her and American English on the way to becoming a very successful model. She seeks out calligraphers, young and old, to write on her body; a friend photographs the results. “Treat me like the page of a book,” she writes. Unsuccessful in her search for the ideal scribe, she decides to publish her pillow book and approaches her father’s publisher now in London with the work. He rejects it in a note as not worth the paper it was written upon.

In the publisher’s office she finds Jerome (Ewan McGregor), whom she had met on an earlier occasion and had cast off as a scribbler, an English translator who knows six languages, for whom the publisher has a great affection. Jerome convinces Nagiko to use his body for her manuscript to present before the publisher during their next tryst. She becomes pen as well as paper; the two pleasures upon which one can depend are flesh and literature. She promises Jerome to create thirteen books, using a different male’s body for each, matching the book to the man’s personality – titles include the innocent, the idiot, the exhibitionist, the seducer, the silence; each individual then presents himself to the publisher for transcribing.

The sixth book is The Lover, using Jerome’s body, who had become despondent after Nagiko refused to see him. The publisher commits a sacrilege and eventually accepts Nagiko’s final book’s denouement. After lighting another pyre in which she destroys all of her books and possessions, she returns to Japan. In her 28^th year Nagiko gives birth to a child upon whose face she writes the same characters as her father had painted upon her face, repeating the tale her parents had shared with her.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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