In Kyoto in the 1970s, a calligrapher delicately writes a greeting on his daughter's face on her birthday. When she becomes a woman, the daughter Nagiko remembers the event with excitement and searches hard to find an ideal calligrapher-lover to use her whole body as his paper. In Hong Kong she meets Jerome, an English translator who convinces her that she should be the pen and not the paper - she should write on his body and he will carry her writing on his skin to a publisher.

The plan works too well. Both lovers become jealous of each other, she of the publisher, he because she impatiently writes on the bodies of other men. In a bid to win Nagiko back, Jerome fakes his own suicide which results in his death. Nagiko grieves, writes a handsome erotic poem on Jerome's corpse and buries him. The publisher exhumes Jerome's body, and flays his skin to make a precious pillow-book of Nagiko's text. The woman is horrified. She schemes to persuade the publisher to relinquish the book of her lover's skin by sending him handsome young calligraphed men, the last of whom becomes the publisher's executioner. The pillow-book of Jerome is returned to Nagiko and she lays it to rest in die soil of a Bonsai tree,

"It may be that there are two stimulations in life that can be, sooner or later, guaranteed to excite and please - sex and text, flesh and literature. Perhaps it is a commendable ambition to try to bring both these two stimulations together, so close together in fact that they can be considered, at least for a time - perhaps for the length of a film - as inseparable".

Peter Greenaway's 1996 Film, THE PILLOW BOOK, is a contemporary story set in Kyoto and Hong Kong at the very end of the twentieth century, but it homages a Japanese pillow book written at the very end of the tenth century, exactly a thousand years before. The original was written by Sei Shonagon, a female courtier at the Japanese Heian Dynasty Imperial Court. It was a collection of reminiscences, of lists, of literary quotes and amormis adventures related in a distance and the especial privilege of the characters, like a piece of paradisiacal science-fiction.

Greenaway has borrowed much of the form, the sensibility and the artificiality of his source in a wholly new fiction that teils of a contemporary Sei Shonagon whose imagination is shaped by the original classic Japanese text until it could be truly said that the book makes the woman. "You are what you read".

This story is driven by a fetish and an Oedipal complexity. The fetish is written text on the body, the desire to use flesh as a writing surface, to use human skin as paper, to consider that the body should be treated as a book to be written on, to make explicit "I can read you like a book".

And the Oedipal complexity is guaranteed when the texts are written by a father onto the skin of his young daughter. When the daughter becomes a woman, the desire to have her lovers write text on her body is so obsessive she cannot decide whether she chooses lovers because they are good calligraphers, or calligraphers because they are good lovers.

Since this is Japan, the texts are beautifully calligraphed in characters that elegantly fit the shapes and curves of the body - female first and then male - for the story has a dramatic gender shift at its centre when the woman ceases to be the paper and becomes the pen. But having found the ideal lover-calligrapher, she loses him, and what was a comforting metaphor - making a book of the body, seeing the body as a book - becomes a grisly reality.

As they do in Japanese painting, word and image constantly interweave in this love story - as does colour and black and white, the Past and the Present, fact and fiction. The history of Japanese painting, they say, is also the history of Japanese calligraphy. To draw a text in Japan is also to write an image. How appropriate the Japanese hieroglyph would be for cinema - a perfect marriage of text and image.

It is true in the West that the image always has the last word, then is it also true in the East, where word, especially the Japanese word, is already always an image?

Peter Greenaway was born in England in 1942. He trained as a painter and first exhibited his pictures at the Lord's Gallery in 1984.
He began working as a film editor in 1965 and spent 11 years cutting films, including numerous documentaries for the Central Office of Information. In 1966 he started making his own films and since then has continued to produce films, paintings, novels and illustrated books.
His feature, THE DRAUGHTMAN'S CONTRACT, completed in 1982, received enormous critical acclaim and established him internationally as one of the most original and important film makers of our times.

Filmography:
1993 - BABY OF MACON
1991 - PROSPERO'S BOOKS
1989 - THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER
1988 - DROWNING BY NUMBERS
1987 - THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT
1986 - A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS
1985 - INSIDE ROOMS - THE BATHROOM
1984 - MAKING A SPLASH
1983 - FOUR AMERICAN COMPOSERS
1982 - THE DRAUGHTSMANS CONTRACT
1981 - ACT OF GOD
1980 - THE FALLS
1978 - 1-100
1978 - A WALK THROUGH H
1977 - DEAR PHONE
1975 - WINDOWS
1975 - WATER
1975 - WRACKETS
1973 - H IS FOR HOUSE
1971 - EROSION
1969 - INTERVALS
1967 - REVOLUTION
1966 - TRAIN
1966 - TREE