Wim Wenders’ recent film Perfect Days traces the mundane life of a toilet cleaner, Hirayama, living in Tokyo. Every day, Hirayama wakes, brushes his teeth, waters his plants, buys a can of coffee from the vending machine near his ratty apartment, and then heads to work. On the way, he listens to classic rock from a humble collection of cassette tapes. During his workday, which he spends mostly in solitude, he cleans the toilets of Tokyo with seriousness and dedication. Occasionally, he runs into his unreliable and obnoxious partner, Takashi. When lunchtime comes around, he enters through the gates of a park, eats a sandwich, and looks up at the sunlight through the treetops, taking a picture with an old camera. After work, he goes to the public bathhouse, before dining at a rowdy subway restaurant that features baseball on the TV. Before going to sleep, he reads a book. Then, he dreams.
Hirayama’s life is full of ritual, repetition. Every day is more or less the same. But on the whole, he seems okay with this. He is notably lacking in restlessness. After all, it is not as if every day is a carbon copy of the last. There is always something new, however insignificant.
Hirayama is a keen and refined observer of life. At a park, he amusedly notices a homeless man in a strange pose, ignored by the others. In the middle of a work day he pauses, looking up at the sun, smiling to himself. Another time he finds a piece of paper hidden in the cracks of a restroom, with a tic-tac-toe grid drawn on it. He then commences a game with an unknown opponent, played out over the course of the next fews days.
Wenders himself has spoken already of a uniquely Japanese philosophy underlying Hirayama’s approach to life.¹ There is, in this worldview, a nobility to doing the same thing again and again, finding meaning in the small details of the process itself. This is exemplified in Japanese craftsmen, like potters, metalworkers, or woodworkers, who uphold the value of meticulous, repetitious, devotion to a pursuit.
We can see this in Hirayama’s dedication to his menial work as a toilet cleaner. He scrubs the restrooms of Tokyo with such precision and thoroughness that despite the nature of the work, we are given the impression of watching a master at his craft. But it is not just in the realm of work where the philosophy applies — it is all encompassing. Hirayama pays close attention to all the experiences unraveling before him, endeavoring to locate their meaning and beauty.
In the meditative rhythm of Hirayama’s routine, the audience comes overtime to feel that life is continually starting anew. His black and white impressionistic dreams signal a sort of refresh point, before life begins again.
There is a Buddhist undertone to this. Life is in constant flux, whether we like it or not. Nothing is ever the same, though in our monotonous routines we may often forget this fact. Seasons change. People age. The city transforms around us. And each new day, we awake and start again, as if we were someone new, someone different. The previous day fades away. We perform a task that we may have done many times before, but really, it is the first time it has been done, at this given time, in these circumstances. It is in close observation of the unremitting flux of life that subtle shades of novelty and beauty are located.
Crucial here is the focus on the present moment. At one point Hirayama’s niece, Niko, visits him, having run away from home. She follows him around in his daily life, and they rekindle a close bond. At one point, Niko suggests they make a trip to the ocean. Hirayama says, “Next time.” When Niko protests, asking when “next time” might be, he responds, almost cryptically: “Next time is next time, now is now.”
But beyond this emphasis on present moments, there is something being said as well about the beauty and purity of private moments. The film is stunningly intimate in its portrayal of Hirayama’s everyday life. We see the beauty, humor, and sadness, through his eyes. Early in the film, Hirayama encounters a crying boy, sitting alone in the toilet, presumably lost. Hirayama kindly escorts the boy out, in search of his mother, holding his hand. When the mother finally arrives, she wipes the boy’s hand, as if in disgust, then shuffles him away without a word to Hirayama. As they depart, the boy turns and waves. Hirayama laughs to himself.
The film is full of such private moments — moments that are never shared, never expressed, that live and die with the protagonist. Indeed Hirayama is not much of a communicator in general. He speaks when necessary, otherwise keeping to himself. He lives alone in his ratty apartment and is an aging man without a family. But despite this the film does not emphasize his loneliness. He seems relatively comfortable in his solitude. When Niko comes to visit him, and his private life is finally put on view for another, we do not get the sense that he has at long last been saved from some solipsistic hell. He enjoys her company while it is there, but that is all. He doesn’t pine after her when she is gone.
It’s possible I am projecting. I am someone born and raised in the era of the internet and social media, where identity and life itself often feels like it lacks any significance if it is not validated in the public sphere. Indeed, it often feels that our very existence comes with an audience in mind.
We might go hiking for the sole purpose of taking a picture, so as to signal to others that we have fulfilling, healthy lives. Or maybe we go on spontaneous adventures, but not for the experience itself, instead merely to acquire memories so that we can have the story to later tell to others. Our everyday life is interpenetrated with what philosopher Niklas Luhmann would call “second-order observation,” or observations from the perspective of a projected general public.² We do not only observe the restaurant itself, but also a cumulative impression given by its various associated Yelp reviews. Modern life is, in this way, oftentimes a mediated, abstract experience.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to be seen, nor experiencing things with others in mind. We are social beings, after all. But taken to an extreme, it can manifest in neurotic ways. See: the influencer whose identity requires constant validation through likes on their photos.
Part of this desire to be seen overlaps with the desire to leave a legacy, something longer lasting than ourselves. We have the sense that expressing a part of ourselves in some external object or accomplishment will quell our death-anxiety.
Hirayama leaves no legacy, or very little. He has a photography hobby, but he shows the results to no one. He is an avid reader, but never thinks to tell his own tale. He does not have a family of his own.
But Wenders portrays in this film a strange poetry to this unmediated, unexpressed, impermanent life. Hirayama does not have the same neurotic obsession towards preservation and self-expression so common to the modern subject. He is content in the fact that he is the only one to experience something. This seems at first glance to be a torturous and lonely sort of existence. But I think there is a deeper wisdom here. Life is, after all, on some level, fleeting and solitary for all of us. Maybe, in the end, our attempts to preserve and express are a bit deluded. Hirayama at the very least tries to make peace with this fact, while many of us refuse to face it. The sun that Hirayama sees through the trees, is his. The sight of the homeless man, seemingly invisible to the rest of bustling Tokyo, is his. And perhaps that is fine. Perhaps that is enough.
In the latter part of the film, Hirayama’s normal routine is interrupted by a series of unfortunate events. His wealthy sister, chauffeured in an expensive black Lexus, picks up Niko. She tearfully asks him if he is “really cleaning toilets”. Hirayama breaks out into tears, and they embrace. There is the implication that something happened to him in the past that led to his current circumstances. The next day, Takashi quits, and Hirayama is left to cover for him. Soon after, he stops by the usual bar, but inadvertently stumbles into a scene of the owner and an unknown man in an embrace, crying. He hurriedly bikes away to buy cigarettes and beer, which he takes to the river, clearly in a saddened state of mind. There, the man from the restaurant approaches him.
Hirayama learns that the man was the bar owner’s ex-husband, and that he has cancer. In a dismal moment, the doomed man asks, almost to himself: “Do shadows get darker if they overlap? There is so much I still don’t know.” After a pause, Hirayama says: “Let’s find out.” By the riverbed, they create an amateur experiment, aligning their shadows. Then they play shadow tag, giggling like schoolboys. Even in the face of death, Hirayama boldly asserts his philosophy.
But is it enough? The ending is ambiguous. The following day, Hirayama moves through his regular morning routine. During his normal commute, he puts on Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”. But this time, his face contorts between a tearful sadness and an unnatural, forced sort of smile. The lyrics play:
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life for me, ooh
And I’m feeling good
But we do not know if he is truly happy, underneath it all.
However, I don’t believe the ending fully undermines Hirayama’s perspective. To me, it is simply an honest portrayal of the pursuit of daily happiness. There is, except for maybe the few enlightened folk, no approach to life that will perfectly shield you from tragedy. Hirayama is an everyman, after all, not a saint. And for the everyman, there is no permanent solution, no breaking through to the other side, no ultimate arrival at an eternal and unassailable state of boundless joy.
While Wim Wenders in many ways extolls Hirayama’s virtues, he is honest too in the fact that for most of us the pursuit of happiness is a constant battle. Simone’s lyrics are apt here. Every day is a “new dawn”, a “new life”, but maybe, like Hirayama, we can try our best to cherish it.
