Perfect Days
A perfect movie, for an imperfect life
We watched Wim Wenders’ new movie Perfect Days yesterday, a calm, meandering meditation about a seemingly lonely man bound to his routine of cleaning toilets in Tokyo.
It was perfect for the lazy afternoon of a long holiday weekend after a work week clotted with too much damn PowerPoint.
For two hours, in the cosseting cool of the cinema, I let myself drift along the river of the movie’s slow, often wordless journey into the quiet joy and refuge of the protagonist Hirayama’s willing retreat from the hurly burly of his previous life.
Soothed by the repetitive routine of Hirayama’s daily life, I embraced his solitary appreciation of trees, the nostalgic pleasure of analog music and that particular Japanese obsession with meticulous cleanliness.
For the movie has a surprising genesis, when the Nippon Foundation’s Tokyo Toilet Project contacted Wenders and proposed that he do a short film or documentary about the 17 public toilets that had been built in and around the bustling Shibuya district of Tokyo.
And indeed, the toilets play a strong role in the movie, for they are not the callously treated public toilets of Singapore, or indeed of practically all big cities.
They are a singular array of inventively designed and beautifully executed public toilets possible only in Japan 🇯🇵
And I enjoyed spotting and identifying each and every one of them as they languidly made their appearances.
Oh! I’d exclaim silently to myself, as one sleek edifice of hygiene made itself known. That’s the one by Tadao Ando! And here’s the one by Kengo Kuma! Ahh, here’s the transparent one by Shigeru Ban. And look out for the one by Toyo Ito, where a quirky game of tic tac toe plays out.
As I watched the movie’s minimal plot unfold, I found myself appreciating the choices that Hirayama had made.
He was kind, giving money to a fellow toilet cleaner out to impress his date and he seemed to find a sort of formal and distant, yet surprisingly deep kinship with a homeless man living in a grove next to one of the public toilets that Hirayama cleaned.
And everywhere, there was the imagery of trees.
Green trees in groves, the dappled canopies of trees with sunlight streaming through, the saplings of the Japanese maples that Hirayama painstakingly collects and grows in his home. Even the long, lingering shots of the piercingly tall skyscraper that Hirayama lives near to, which turns out to be the Tokyo Skytree.
As the movie progresses, people appear in Hirayama’s life, and in the last third, we learn enough to glean a sense of Hirayama’s past and how he had landed in his current life, living in what can only be described as a semi-hovel — clean but seemingly even without an attached bathroom.
Yet, even after that little revelation of his past life, I found myself preferring Hirayama’s present, than his possibly quite splendid and glamorous past.
The movie stayed with me as I went about the rest of the day, and the next day, inspired by the mood and sensibility that Perfect Days had tried to convey, I decided to attempt my own Perfect Day.
So my partner and I, we got on our bicycles in the early morning and took off along the nearby Rail Corridor, a disused railway track route that cuts my city Singapore in half from north to south.
We cycled through a cool misty morning, and in due time, the forest enveloped us on both sides, birdsong everywhere.
And I thought of the slight smile that Hirayama had every day he went to clean the Tokyo toilets, the pictures he took of the trees with his ancient film camera, and I realised, with some guilt, how strange it was that I needed to be reminded to take in the things in life that mattered.
And so, as the weekend ends, and I am faced with yet another work week to come, I close my eyes and remember that the trees, the birds and the calm that they bring, are waiting for me, if I only remember, as Hirayama did, to revel in the comfort of the small things.
They often cost us nothing, and yet, if we embrace them, can end up meaning everything.
