Imperiously demure, exhibiting an impassive beauty, her womanly emotions fully contained by a porcelain-perfect complexion, Chinese-born actress Vivian Wu has almost always adhered to her homeland's archetypal notion of female grace. She played to stereotype in such Asian-themed blockbusters as The Last Emperor (1987), The Joy Luck Club (1993), and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993). But there is one outstanding exception to Vivian's rule of staid appearances. That joyous aberration is The Pillow Book (1995). In Asian culture, pillow books are tomes compiling erotic writings. In the movie, Vivian's slender, naked body is used as the manuscript upon which these sensual stories are written and then played out. Almost every inch of her skin, including that moist strip of flesh stretching from her heavenly portal to her excretory porthole, is shown off from every available angle. Tradition will never be the same.