This film begins with the gentleness between father and daughter and ends with the violent death of The Publisher and Jerome and the birth of a child born out of Jerome and Nagiko. In between this, we watch as Nagiko plays out her carnal desire for pleasure by sleeping with men who she wants to write upon her flesh. She has traveled down a path of lustful fulfillment after her father was blackmailed. We see how her desire stems from the closeness from her father that was corrupted. And in an effort to reclaim that closeness she sought out any means possible, and thus her fetish was born.
What's most clear about this film is that regardless of the satisfaction sex brings in the end all that remains are the broken lives created by carnal lust. The Publisher penetrated generations of Nagiko's family and stripped the softness out of her that she could only recreate in sensual acts with calligraphy. Every person The Publisher came in contact with he perpetrates a break upon their soul, and when he finally awakens to the reality of what he has done the guilt buries him to the point that he ends his life.
The pain of this film is in every frame of carnal expression, or every word held back as the real seduction is in Nagiko's yearning for revenge. In the end she gets it, but the real question is has she continued the violence The Publisher began? Now, with her own child Nagiko writes upon their face as her Father did. This begins the journey they will have together and whether she will change the course of her daughter's fate to become as she has.
