As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko's father paints characters on her face, and her mother reads to her from "The Pillow Book," the diary of a tenth century lady-in-waiting. Nagiko grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies, and her sexual odyssey (and the creation of her own Pillow Book) is a "parfait mélange" of classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and Western film images.
One of the characters spins a plate in the background while the heroine
and her lover make love in the bathtub.