"Perfect Days": review

Koji Yakusho (L) as Hirayama and Arisa Nakano (R) as Niko 

[WARNING: some spoilers.]

"Perfect Days," on my radar for a while, is a 2023 Japanese-German film directed by the ethereal Wim Wenders (famous for "Wings of Desire" among other films; "Wings" was unnecessarily remade) and co-written by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki. It stars Koji Yakusho (of "Tampopo" and "13 Assassins" fame) as Hirayama, an older gentleman who cleans toilets for a living in the upscale Shibuya district of Tokyo. While the movie doesn't have much of a plot, it's a slice-of-life picture that gets us inside Hirayama's head using very little dialogue and allows us to appreciate his circumscribed world as he sees it.

What plot there is might be described this way: Hirayama is a man who is almost monastic in his daily routines. The sound of an old lady's street-sweeping broom outside wakes him up every weekday; he dresses, has a humble breakfast, grabs a coffee from a nearby vending machine in his lower-class neighborhood, and drives to work in his old van, which is filled with cleaning products and equipment. The van has something else as well: an enviable collection of cassette tapes of mostly Western music ranging from Lou Reed to Otis Redding to Nina Simone. Hirayama listens to these tunes with a little smile on his face as he drives to work. Hirayama's toilet-cleaning colleague is the much younger, more talkative, and generally flakier Takashi (Tokio Emoto), whose moped craps out one day, inspiring Takashi to beg Hirayama to borrow the older man's van so he can go on a date. Hirayama also ends up loaning Takashi some money after Takashi tries to convince Hirayama to sell his cassettes, which are valuable because they've come back into vogue. Hirayama refuses. Takashi is forever rating everything on a scale from one to ten, and as he fears, his potential girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada) isn't really that interested in him. Little breaks in Hirayama's routine happen all the time during the week or so that we peer into his life; at another point, Hirayama's niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) appears and stays at his place a few nights, making Hirayama a bit nervous to have a young, teenaged girl in his house. When Hirayama breaks for lunch, he goes to a wooded park by a shrine, eats a sandwich, drinks a carton of milk, and photographs trees—or rather, he tries to capture the play of light and shadow through the trees' branches, called komorebi in Japanese—an important concept for art, aesthetics, and the simple appreciation of life. Hirayama spends time in a local bathhouse, marinating in the hot water and sinking slightly below the surface to blow bubbles through his nose. In an underground arcade, there's a restaurant where he's a regular, and his favorite bar-restaurant is run by Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa), a woman who gossips and is a talented singer. Once a week, Hirayama does his laundry at a local laundromat.

Hirayama reads books at night, including Faulkner in translation, and he takes his job as a toilet cleaner more seriously than his young assistant Takashi does. One of the film's quiet conflicts is between Hirayama's Zen appreciation of his surroundings and Takashi's constantly distracted, stressed monkey mind, which is unable to settle down. Eventually, Takashi flakes out and quits his job, selfishly leaving Hirayama to cover his work. The arrival of Hirayama's niece Niko reconnects him with another branch of his family and allows him to see life from a younger person's perspective. Niko seems to have a habit of running away from home, but instead of becoming a vagrant, she simply crashes, this time, at her uncle Hirayama's house. Later in the movie, Hirayama encounters a man (Tomokazu Miura) with cancer, the ex-husband of the above-mentioned Mama. The man, Tomoyama, wants to make peace with his ex-wife, and he laments the idea of dying despite still not knowing so many things, like whether two shadows, when they cross, become more intensely dark. Hirayama's sister Keiko (Yumi Aso), the mother of Niko, eventually comes over to his place in her chauffeur-driven limousine to pick Niko up. She tells Hirayama that their father's dementia has worsened to the point where he will no longer behave as he used to toward Hirayama, but Hirayama wordlessly rejects a chance to visit him, thus hinting at some of the other forces at work in Hirayama's life and perhaps giving us a clue as to why he now spends his "perfect days" cleaning toilets. The movie ends on an upswell of emotion that will remind viewers of Bob Hoskins's Harold Shand in "The Long Good Friday," in which a series of strong feelings plays across Hoskins's face. In Hirayama's case, though, it's a completely different set of emotions.

Koji Yakusho is, at this point, something of a Japanese national treasure. He slips chameleonically into his various roles, to the point where it's hard to imagine the same man playing both a hardened samurai in "13 Assassins" and a blandly pleasant older man with a rich inner life in "Perfect Days." Yakusho carries the film for sure, and in general, the actors around him also portray their characters well. I did have some annoyance at Takashi the young, flaky coworker, but I'm still trying to parse out whether that's because of Takashi's personality as scripted or because Tokio Emoto plays the character in such an obviously exaggerated way. Takashi's monkey mind rubs me the wrong way for sure, but I'm forced by his example to acknowledge my own problems with distraction and general lack of focus.

It's tempting to read the entire movie as, like "Tampopo" (another movie starring Yakusho, but as a gangster having culinary adventures), a Zen treatise on living each fleeting moment deeply and not getting attached to any particular thing. Hirayama's daily routine is monastic in its rigidity, supporting this idea. But Zen, and Buddhism in general, is about approaching life with equanimity, and the movie's final moments are the exact opposite of equanimity as Hirayama's emotions come boiling to the surface. I can relate, on some level, to Hirayama, who strives for serenity perhaps because of a tumultuous past, yet who also still feels the strong gusts and storms of sentiment. "Perfect Days" is quiet on its surface but thunderous when you look at it more profoundly.

And hats off to Wim Wenders, who is generally known as one of the more spiritual directors, for capturing this Japanese spirit as well as he did. In terms of background, Wenders apparently wrote the character of Hirayama as an alcoholic businessman who tears himself away from his hollow, unfulfilling life to find peace. We never learn, in the film, whether Hirayama was, in fact, a businessman, just as we never learn whether he'd ever been married (his nervousness around young women like Niko and Aya, who startles Hirayama by impulsively kissing him on the cheek, would suggest not). The film opens a door into this man's life and lets us spend about a week with him, watching his routines and how those routines get interrupted as life, with its vicissitudes, buffets him as it buffets everyone.

Some critics have compared this film to "Paterson," which is a study in life and its repeated, fractal patterns; I think there are definitely points in common between the two stories, but whereas "Paterson" was a study of the fractal nature of life itself, "Perfect Days" is a study of the depth one finds by simply being in the present moment... and how that depth doesn't make one immune to the constant push-pull of everyday life and human relationships. "Perfect Days" is quietly beautiful and quietly sad; if you watch it it, you'll leave the experience looking at life with fresh eyes. If you're ready, that is, and not possessed of monkey mind.