If someone were to ask me what Wim Wenders’ latest film Perfect Days is about, I would have a hard time giving them a concrete answer. The film has a sparse storyline that follows a week in the life of Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Over the course of the week, Hirayama goes about the repetitive business of daily life. He doesn’t experience any grand epiphanies about the world, and by the end of the film, he remains essentially unchanged.
But what this answer fails to express is how cleverly Wenders has taken the material of daily life and imbued it with extraordinary beauty. This is particularly noticeable in the opening sequence, where the camera follows every step of Hirayama’s morning routine from folding his futon, to brushing his teeth and watering his plants. Wenders doesn’t rush these movements. Instead, he wants us to appreciate how beauty can be found in the mundane – whether that be the morning light flickering on the futon or the crisp geometry of the bathroom sink.
Wenders captures the rest of Hirayama’s week with an equally intimate attention to detail. Over the course of the film, we see Hirayama clean the same toilets, eat lunch in the same park, and visit the same noodle bar for dinner every day.
While another filmmaker would have shot the solitary repetitiveness of Hirayama’s life in a more depressing light, Wenders emphasises the fulfilment Hirayama experiences in his ability to enjoy the simple pleasures that punctuate his days. Unlike the hurrying crowds that surround him, Hirayama pauses to photograph trees and to watch the movement of sunlight on the pavement.
One of Hirayama’s main daily pleasures is music. Each day as he drives around the city, he plays an album from his vast collection of classic rock cassettes. From Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ to Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, these songs provide an upbeat change of pace to the film’s quiet repetitiveness and make for satisfying montages that allow us to take in Tokyo’s sprawling landscape.
It was this landscape that provided Wenders with the initial inspiration for his film. When he visited Tokyo a few years ago, he was fascinated by how the city’s crumbling temples and bathhouses blended seamlessly with its skyscrapers and highways.
The relationship between old and new emerges as one of the film’s key themes. While Hirayama hasn’t moved on from the days of cassette tapes and point-and-shoot cameras, he is constantly surrounded by young people who lead quite different lives.
His twenty-something-year-old co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) is the epitome of Gen Z. He can’t spend a moment away from his iPhone and speaks almost exclusively in abbreviated slang. While Takashi provides a comedic lightness that cuts through the film’s heavier material, his character does border on the cliché.
Despite this, Wenders manages to avoid the kind of simplistic glorification of the past that other filmmakers fall into. In one poignant scene, Hirayama carefully teaches Takashi’s love interest Aya (Aoi Yamada) how to rewind a cassette. In return, Aya shows Hirayama what Spotify is. The exchange of knowledge leaves each character equally amazed, revealing how the new and the old can happily co-exist, just like Tokyo’s landscape itself.
Much of the film’s elegance comes from what Wenders has decided to leave out. In interviews, Wenders has said that he sees Hirayama as a former businessman who has suffered a breakdown from the stressful working conditions that are typical of many corporate jobs, especially in Tokyo. However, instead of explicitly laying out Hirayama’s backstory, Wenders leaves it for the audience to piece together for themselves.
The script, a collaboration between Wenders and Japanese filmmaker Takuma Takasaki, is fittingly understated. Without much dialogue, the film’s subtle visual cues become integral to piecing together Hirayama’s past.
For example, his compulsive reading habit, which includes works by William Faulkner and Aya Kōda, show that he is obviously well-educated, while his choice of iced water at dinner each night hints at a previous drinking problem.
But Hirayama’s past is not meant to be the focus of the film. This is made clear in one of the final scenes when Hirayama and his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) are riding their bikes along the river. Niko wants to talk about their plans for the next day, but Hirayama stops her. “Now is now”, he says.
In a world that feels increasingly complex, Hirayama’s philosophy is a necessary reminder to appreciate the present and find joy in life’s simple pleasures. While Wenders’ film may be understated, its message is powerful and transformative.
