Perfect Days (Japanese, 2023)

Perfect Days, a Japanese film, directed by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, is a meditative film, set in modern day Tokyo.

Source: https://beta.flim.ai/

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The plot

Much like the films of Yasujirō Ozu, Perfect Days features a minimalistic narrative. The film centers around Hirayama, a middle-aged man portrayed by Kōji Yakusho, who works as a public toilet cleaner for the city. The film unfolds in two layers.

The first layer of the film presents a detailed depiction of Hirayama's meticulously structured daily routine. Each workday begins at sunrise, awakened by the sound of the street cleaner outside his flat. Following the same morning grooming ritual, he waters his plants, dons his Tokyo Toilet uniform, and sets out to clean his assigned toilets before the city's residents start their day. Before getting into the work van, he always picks up a beverage from a vending machine outside his flat, using coins strategically placed on a table beside his entrance door.

On the way to work, he listens to music, typically old Western songs, on his van's cassette player. In the morning, he takes a break to eat breakfast in the park before resuming his work schedule. After returning home, he visits a public bath for his daily ablutions, eats supper at a diner in the subway station, and ends his day by reading a book in bed. This cycle repeats except on his days off, which follow a different routine that includes doing laundry at a laundromat, picking up developed photos that he has taken with an analog camera, cleaning the house, biking along a river path, buying a new book, and dining at the same restaurant.

While the first layer is solitary, the second layer of the film consists of Hirayama's interactions with other people, providing a more nuanced view of his personality. Four people enter his life, each dragging him away from his rigid routine.

First is his colleague Takashi (played by Tokio Emoto), who is pursuing the attractive Aya (Aoi Yamada). Takashi needs money to take Aya on a date and drags Hirayama into a store that pays good prices for his cassettes, as analog is becoming popular with collectors in Tokyo. The seemingly placid Hirayama's heart is set aflutter when Aya impulsively kisses him on the cheek.

Second is his niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), who arrives at his doorstep after running away from home. Niko's mother, Keiko (played by Yumi Asō), Hirayama's sister, arrives to pick up her daughter in a chauffeur-driven car, indicating her wealth. Her mild incredulity at her brother's profession implies they come from an upper-class family. The conversations suggest the siblings have drifted apart, and Hirayama is estranged from his father.

The third person is Tomoyama (played by Tomokazu Mura), whom Hirayama catches in an indiscreet moment with the hostess of his go-to restaurant (played by Sayuri Ishikawa). Hirayama's interactions with Tomoyama, with whom he plays shadow-tag, a game where players try to step on each other's shadows to "tag" them, reveal the playful and childlike side of his personality.

Hirayama's playful nature is also evident in his interactions with a fourth unknown person, with whom he plays a different and more popular game- an asynchronous game of noughts and crosses on a piece of paper left in a public toilet. We can infer this stranger is a foreigner since the thank-you message left at the end is written in English.

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Observations

La dolce vita

The sweet life is what people project on their social media feeds. Our Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with pictures of holidays at exotic locations, night-outs at fancy bars, romantic dates and picture perfect weddings. Hence, at first, we might instinctively view Hirayama's routine negatively. How can a person lead such a robotic life! However, as we follow Hirayama's day, we begin to recognize our own lives in his. Most days, nothing significant happens in our lives either. Like Hirayama, we have two routines: one for workdays and one for weekends. Within these routines, a significant portion of our time is spent addressing basic needs: bathing, using the toilet, eating, cooking, doing laundry, and so on. This prompts many of us to ask "what is the meaning of life". Usually, by that question, what we are really asking is "how should I spend my days". As the author Annie Dillard wrote "how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives".

Perfect Days is director Wim Wenders' meditative answer to the question of what constitutes a good day and hence a good life. It is not the pursuit of a sweet life filled with sensory pleasures, but rather the sense of contentment found in whatever we are doing. This contentment prevents our minds from falling into what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "psychic entropy" a state in which a person's attention is scattered and their thoughts and emotions are disjointed. The reason we keep reaching for phones through the day is because we feel something is lacking in the current moment. At any point of time, we want to be somewhere else doing something else. Life is thus a continuous search for the next high, even if the high is a minor one like a new text message from a friend.

Hirayama, on the other hand, is fully immersed in the present. Nowhere is Hirayama's immersion in the present more evident than at his job. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow describes a state of complete absorption and focus in an activity, where one's skills are perfectly aligned with the challenges at hand. Hirayama enters this state of flow while cleaning toilets. His meticulous care in scrubbing every part, including the urinal screen mats, contrasts sharply with Takashi, who distracts himself with his smartphone, while working.

Hirayama is so dedicated to his work that he brings his own tools in addition to those provided by his employer, despite the lack of social prestige in his profession. When Hirayama finds a lost child crying in the restroom, the child's mother does not thank him; her first reaction is to sanitize her son's hands upon seeing Hirayama's Tokyo Toilet uniform. In contrast, both the child and Hirayama's niece, Niko, who have not yet absorbed societal prejudices, do not judge his profession. Hirayama savors the goodbye gesture from the lost child despite his mother's ungrateful reaction.

Outside of work, Hirayama has a rich array of interests, including an appreciation for nature, music, fiction (his bookshelf features The Wild Palms by William Faulkner, Eleven Short Stories by Patricia Highsmith, and Trees by Aya Kōda), and photography. Each morning, as he steps out of his flat, he takes a moment to admire the early morning sky. The cassette he chooses for his car's music system is always selected to match his mood. Simple pleasures, like picking up a sapling from the park to plant on his balcony, bring him joy. He lives in an analog world where waiting is acceptable. It’s okay to wait for the next song you truly love instead of creating a curated playlist on Spotify (which to Niko's amusement, he mistakes for a physical store). It’s okay to wait a few days for developed photographs from the studio, even if some don't turn out well.

Hirayama's life is far from perfect. Loneliness is evident in his eyes as he gazes at the city's buildings from a bridge, and his eyes well up with tears after parting with his sister, revealing deep emotional anguish. A departure from his routine, such as covering Takashi's route after his sudden resignation, causes him considerable stress. Yet, dealing with other pesky humans is intrinsic to life. Living a socially isolated life is not good for mental health, a sentiment single adults in big cities can easily relate to. Many of us living isolated lives in cities take comfort from a familiar landmark like the Tokyo Skytree, which is a constant presence in the film.

Even Csikszentmihalyi warned that the intense focus and absorption in a flow state can lead to a loss of emotional and behavioral flexibility when interacting with others. Hence, it's not that Hirayama has everything figured out. Someone from a less industrialized society might find his lack of deep relationships depressing. However, the underlying message of the film—that a joyful life is about being immersed in the present rather than constantly striving to be something else—is wise. As Hirayama tells Niko, "Next Time is Next Time, Now is Now".

We have all heard platitudes about living in the present and stopping to smell the roses. However, intellectual reasoning alone cannot bring us to that state. The real question is: how do we live such a life? Wim Wenders is not a self-help guru; he is illustrating what such a life would look like. It is up to us to learn how to step off our goal-oriented treadmill and embrace a more present-focused existence. One way the filmmaker hints at achieving this is by bringing intentionality and concentrated attention to even the most mundane tasks, as Hirayama does—whether cleaning toilets or organizing photographs into boxes. Such a life is not linear, measured by progress against predefined milestones like money and rank. Rather, it is cyclical, where each day we die and are renewed again the next, just like the toilets Hirayama cleans get dirty and need to be cleaned again.

The Tokyo Toilet Project

The toilets showcased in the film are part of The Tokyo Toilet Project, a real-life initiative launched by The Nippon Foundation in 2020 to transform public restrooms in Tokyo's Shibuya district into visually appealing spaces. The project engaged 16 renowned architects and designers, including Pritzker Prize winners, to create 17 unique toilet facilities. You can view these toilets that were showcased in the film here. Noting the names of each toilet that appear in the film from the website is a fun activity. This real-life project is resonant with the film's central theme of finding beauty in the mundane.

One detail I'm uncertain about is whether the successive rounds of tic-tac-toe were played in the same restroom or across multiple locations. It seemed to me that three toilets were involved in the game: those at Jingu-Dori Park, Yoyogi-Hachiman Shrine, and Ebisu Park.

Hirayama the enigma

One of the pleasures of watching the film is unraveling layers of Hirayama's character as the story unfolds, yet never quite being certain. It seems plausible, though not definite, that Hirayama has intentionally chosen a life of finding joy in small things as a way to cope with past sorrows. Clues such as his background from at least a middle-class, if not affluent, family suggest that his job cleaning toilets was a decision rather than a necessity. The dreamlike, hazy black-and-white sequences, his strained relationship with his father (who appears in one of his dreams), the apparent emotional distance between siblings despite underlying affection, and the tearful goodbye to his sister all hint at a backstory marked by emotional turmoil. Yet, nothing dramatic need to have happened for Hirayama to choose the life he did. Many of us step off the hedonic treadmill as we get disillusioned with its outcomes.

Takashi

While Hirayama is the protagonist, Takashi, despite his somewhat peripheral role, is also memorable. The younger man lives a life in stark contrast to that of joyful engagement. He pursues Aya but after getting his way with her, ignores her. He quits his job, clearly dissatisfied, and we suspect he may not find fulfillment in his next endeavor either. Despite this, Takashi remains immensely likable, and his consistent use of a ten-point scale to evaluate everything from Aya's beauty to the likelihood of events is endearing. We hope that Takashi, like all of us, will gain some of Hirayama's wisdom as he grows older.

Komorebi

The original title of the film was Komorebi, a Japanese term that literally means "tree-filtered sunlight" or "sunlight leaking through leaves." This describes the phenomenon of sunlight passing through the gaps between leaves and branches, creating patterns of light and shadow. Beyond its literal meaning, the word carries cultural significance in Japan, alluding to the joy of observing the simple beauty of nature in our everyday lives.

In a literal sense, komorebi appears in the film in three ways. First, Hirayama takes multiple photographs of it at the same spot in a park. In a later scene, as he reviews the developed photographs, they all appear to capture komorebi. The fact that he takes multiple pictures of what might seem like the same thing to most of us reveals his ability to discern subtle distinctions caused by changes in light patterns that may be opaque to us. This reflects the same concentrated attention he applies to cleaning toilets, noticing dirty crevices that his colleague Takashi would probably overlook.

Second, komorebi appears as a recurring theme in all his dreams.

Finally, the underlying concept of komorebi—shadows created from light hitting a physical object—is emphasized again towards the end of the film, when Hirayama and Tomoyama test whether shadows become darker when they intersect and play a game of shadow tag. This observation of shadows serves as a metaphor for deriving joy from focused attention on what might appear to be commonplace and banal to a distracted mind.

Blue

Blue is the thematic color of the film. It appears through the film including Hirayama's uniform, the shirt he wears on his day off, the color of his van and Takashi's scooter, Nikos's jeans, among other artifacts.

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Perfect Days, much like Ozu's films, is akin to strolling for hours on a misty day and gradually finding yourself soaked. Watching the film is experiencing firsthand its central theme of discovering beauty and joy in the everyday mundane.