The Pillow Book is divided into 10 chapters (consistent with Greenaway's love of numbers and lists) and is shot to be viewed like a book, complete with tantalizing illustrations and footnotes (subtitles) and using television's "screen-in-screen" technology. An arresting Japanese model seeks to indulge her fantasy of having calligraphy inked on her body, a whim based partly on her father's habit of painting poetry on her face when she was a girl and partly on readings from the 10th-century erotica tome "The Pillow Book." But the tables are turned when she meets a bisexual English translator who wants to be her canvas instead. An assault on the senses in the best Greenaway tradition, featuring frames-within-frames, elaborate costuming and production design, painterly shot composition, and utterly frank scenes of nudity and violence.