The Pillow Book is writer and director Peter Greenaway's latest work — a mesmerizing and richly developed drama about East and West, past and present, word and image, fact and fiction. On each birthday during her childhood in Kyoto, Nagiko's calligrapher father paints a creative greeting on her face. Later in the day, her aunt reads to her from The Pillow Book written by a female courtier in the Japanese Imperial Court one thousand years earlier. The little girl starts keeping her own diary (pillow book). She also discovers that her father is being forced to have sex with his publisher in exchange for money and publication.

At 18 Nagiko (Vivian Wu) marries but soon leaves her husband. In Hong Kong she finds lovers who will paint her body in exchange for sex. Jerome (Ewan McGregor), an English translator, gives her the idea of taking charge of her own life by switching roles and writing calligraphy on men's bodies. After finding out that Jerome is the lover of the publisher who humiliated her father, she starts a series of 13 erotic poems delivered to her enemy on men's nude bodies.

Those familiar with Peter Greenaway's other films (The Draughtsman's Contract, Drowning By Numbers, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) will recognize the same interest in the link between sex and power and a fascination with a complex narrative line. The Pillow Book manages to carry on his tradition of cherishing both the exotic and the erotic.