The Pillow Book

Secrets of the skin

[Contains spoilers]

This week I write about a film director whose work is decidedly niche, and whose sensibility is so singular that I think it merits analysis. The director is Peter Greenaway, and the film is The Pillow Book (1997).

Janet Maslin of the New York Times, who reviewed it at the time of its premiere, called it ‘rapturously perverse’ and possessed of a ‘rarefied allure’. ¹ ‘Weird’ would not be an unreasonable way to qualify Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre, but it distresses me that his films are falling into obscurity. It’s not that weirdness is out of fashion these days. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things got a best picture nomination, racked up ninety wins across the film industry awards landscape, and it is a very strange film. Its hyperbolic characterizations, language, and plot all require suspension of belief to be appreciated, and still, it’s won critical acclaim. (For good reason, I would say.)

Yet those demands are less extreme than what a Greenaway film asks for. Here, you need your proverbial thinking cap firmly on, as these films are, intellectually-speaking, wild rides. They are mysterious, horny, poetic and perplexing, not to mention a little gross in places.

The plots usually revolve around cerebral challenges, puzzles or games. The Pillow Book (1997) offers two things‌: an erotic quest, and a protracted scheme for revenge. That’s about all the simplicity you get; this is no ordinary book-to-film adaptation. The literary work itself is extraordinary, and not the kind of thing you would consider filmable.

The source material, explained by the main character’s okasan, is The Pillow Book (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi), the 1000-year old writing of Kiyohara Nagiko, or Sei Shōnagon as she was known in the Heian-period court. One can well understand Greenaway’s fascination with it, since it contains lists of all kinds. An earlier film Drowning By Numbers (1988) is a perfect illustration of how the director opens with a list, in a night scene where a young girl dressed in the manner of a seventeenth century Spanish infanta is skipping rope and rattling off the names of one hundred stars in the sky, while a middle-aged couple cavort (lasciviously, and disturbingly) in the background). ²

Sei Shōnagon, who was a Lady-in-waiting at the court of the Empress Teishi around the year 1000, is a millenarian kindred spirit. In her case, the lists are delightful compendiums of her quotidian observations, with titles such as ‘Things that make the heart beat faster’:

Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt.

It is night and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of raindrops, which the wind blows against the shutters. 

or ‘Things that arouse a fond memory of the past’:

Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon.

as well as Depressing things:

A dog howling in the daytime. A lying-in room when the baby has died. A cold, empty brazier. An ox driver who hates his oxen.

With delightful imagery, Greenaway quotes:

Elegant things:

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Wisteria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow.
A pretty child eating strawberries.

Lady Shōnagon recorded court gossip, and especially items of a sexual nature. She kept a collection of ‘morning-after’ letters. So it would seem to be another thing in common. Lists, numbers cataloging things, and sex are the three givens in all Greenaway’s work. Although the films’ sexual themes are interwoven with other topics, his favorites apparently being infidelity and murder. The director’s obsessions are represented by those of his characters, which are formalized or even ritualized, through composition, camera work and editing.

As such, the The Pillow Book’s unusual film language contains a vocabulary, a system of signs the viewer must divine to understand not so much the plot, as the subtext and backstory. This experimental approach includes static and active insets of varying sizes and colors.

Given the scope of Greenaway’s formalist tendencies, I’d like to stress how much these techniques add symbolic depth to the story. Every shape we see is chosen for precise reasons. For instance, in the opening scene, an overhead shot of a phonograph playing the musical motif of the protagonist’s childhood, match cuts to a scene where a handheld mirror reflects her face. The mirror’s importance is highlighted through the use of full color, where the rest of the scene is in black & white. Interplay between the two modes is constant throughout the film, as are the insets, filters and images used to signal certain themes. Greenaway chooses passages from the Pillow Book and at key moments, harmonizing them with the music and superimposing the text over action scenes, accompanied by traditional Japanese music and the narration of text. The palimpsest effect is stunning, and it provides a visual infrastructure for the complexities of the main character’s psyche as well as a way to move from scene to scene.

The main character, Nagiko (Vivian Wu), named after Sei Shonagon, moves from the little girl seen in the first scene, to unhappy wife, and then anonymous restaurant worker in Kowloon, to reinvent herself as an alluring fashion model. The central psychological themes of her life bloom alongside her material advancement in the world. The first of these themes is a fetish for writing on skin, experienced in childhood as a birthday blessing ritual performed every year by her father. In the film’s pivotal first scene, he paints her face while reciting the Buddhist genesis story, which becomes the origin of Nagiko's obsession, and the cinematic key to the film's paradigm.

As this obsession grows, Nagiko spends most of the film searching for the perfect calligrapher/lover, and finds him at last in Jerome (Ewan MacGregor), an English translator. Mirroring Sei Shōnagon’s text, Nagiko declares her love for the smell of paper, equating it with the smell of the skin of a new lover. Jerome will serve as a go-between in order for Nagiko to have her writing published. Jerome, who indulges Nagiko’s strange passion, will also help her by sleeping with the publisher, and presenting her work anonymously, as writing on his body. Here especially, if one does not succumb to the poetry of this act, a viewer might have a WTF moment, but symbolism is doing all the heavy lifting here. Not even literal events can be taken literally. At the end of the second act, there is betrayal on all sides, and death ensues. The metaphor of body as book and skin as paper become literal at the film’s climax when, after his death by suicide, Jerome’s written-on skin is turned into a book.

Once Jerome is dead, Nagiko is left with only her long-desired plan to revenge herself on her father’s publisher, who, since her childhood had been forcing him into a sexual liaison in exchange for being published. Early in the movie she says: “It was on my fourth birthday while my aunt was reading Sei Shōnagon that I saw my father and his publisher together for the first time. Though I was certain that any clear understanding of what I had witnessed would have to wait until I was much older.”

Nagiko will fulfill her promise to Jerome to produce thirteen books:

The Book of the Agenda 
The Book of the Innocent
The Book of the Idiot
The Book of Impotence/old age
The Book of the Exhibitionist
The Book of the Lovers
The Book of the Seducer
The Book of Youth
The Book of Secrets
The Book of Silence
The Book of the Betrayed
The Book of False Starts
The Book of the Dead

These are the thirteen ways Greenaway chooses to advance the story, devising thirteen ingenious vignettes to represent each book. Nagiko will exact revenge on her father’s publisher by striking a deal with him that spells out his demise.

But ultimately, her story becomes as static as the kanji (永) meaning eternal, which we see several times after Jerome’s death. The story comes full circle with the birth of her child, who she will presumably paint birthday blessings for. As a child, her father told her she should have her own pillow book. This, she finally writes. What lives on is the relatable human experiences of her own diary, the mirror of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book.

If you haven’t seen The Pillow Book, I don’t think the spoilers in this review will matter. If you have seen it, I hope you’ll watch it again.

THE PILLOW BOOK · Written and directed by Peter Greenaway

Produced by Kees Kasander

Starring:

Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor, Ken Ogata,Yoshi Oida, Hideko Yoshida, and Judy Ongg

Cinematography: Sacha Vierny

Edited by Peter Greenaway and Chris Wyatt

Music by Brian Eno

Release dates: 12 May, 1996 (Cannes)

1. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/pillow-film-review.html

2. What is this couple doing in the scene? Foreshadowing. Greenaway is a master of transitions.