Perfect Days (2023) | Directed by Wim Wenders © Master Mind, DCM, and Bitters End
In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck on his way to work. But in this scene, as the early light and Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” fill the van, the ever-smiling Hirayama suddenly breaks into a confusing succession of grins and frowns, smiles and tears. Throughout the two-hour film, we have watched him seek perfection in mindfulness—but it isn’t until this final scene that Hirayama acknowledges the cost of his quest.
Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) spends his working hours cleaning Tokyo’s public restrooms. Wenders, who cowrote the script with Takuma Takasaki, shows as much care for the character’s daily, ascetic routine as Hirayama does: the camera dwells on the beloved bonsais in his apartment, the komorebi—light filtered through the leaves of a tree—that he photographs with his analog camera, and the toilet bowls he scrubs with joyful meticulousness. Through the many close-ups on his face, the film centers Hirayama’s perspective on the world around him; for nearly a week, we see a series of self-contained, repetitive, beautiful days—a refuge of familiarity and grace.
Many critics have therefore interpreted the film as a celebratory depiction of, well, perfect days: a “sublime meditation on gratitude,” a “zen meditation on beauty, fulfillment and simplicity,” even a “meditative treatise on mindfulness.” Some, especially on the left, critiqued Perfect Days as an affluent fantasy of “the simple life,” in which one might “escape through ascetic choices the worst effects of our lives under capitalism,” as Eileen Jones wrote in her review for Jacobin. In an interview, Wenders reluctantly admitted that he had imagined Hirayama as someone who has given up an unhappy life as a wealthy businessman to become the kind of person who notices the “play of leaves and sunlight and shadows moving.” While critics may differ over whether the resulting film is a performance of mindfulness or escapism, they seem to agree that Perfect Days wholeheartedly celebrates Hirayama’s life choice.
The film’s first cleaning job paints a miniature portrait of Hirayama’s evolution. In a neat coverall, he enters a toilet in Tokyo’s yuppie Shibuya district for an early morning cleaning, sharing the frame with a slumped and hungover businessman, still in his suit, who barely acknowledges Hirayama’s existence. Outside in the street , other businessmen hurry to work. The disregard these “old Hirayamas” show the “new Hirayama” on the job is later mirrored by Hirayama’s sister’s classism, as she asks him, with incredulity rather than curiosity: “Do you really clean toilets now?”
In concentrating on the difference between the “bad” old and “good” new Hirayama, critics miss that the character never expresses himself along such lines, and close attention shows us that the film portrays neither existence as untroubled. In fact, the problem with Hirayama’s new life might be the same thing that made him miserable in the old one: a lack of intimacy and connectedness.
In interviews, Wenders describes how Hirayama was inspired by the quiet, sensitive lives of monks. Hirayama, however, is a quintessentially neoliberal version of it—a monk without a monastery. He belongs to no order; his code is his own, and he has neither brothers nor abbot. However, he does seem to possess their cloistered asceticism. Hirayama’s new lifestyle relies on the removal of potential obstacles to his focus on the beauty of the present—obstacles that include family, close friendships, and romance. Hirayama’s response to any of these “threats” is passivity at best, withdrawal at worst. The filmmakers don’t disguise the potential of Hirayama’s distance to cause pain to himself and others. As Hirayama’s chatterbox coworker Takashi—whose contrasting life is punctuated by romantic drama, financial anxiety, and general impatience—asks Hirayama: “Aren’t you ever lonely?”
In the latter third of the film, a series of scenes disrupt the idyllic rhythm of the preceding days and illustrate the ambiguity that underpins Hirayama’s life. For one thing, his teenage niece Niko suddenly appears at his doorstep. We might expect the beginning of a hero’s journey: a solitary uncle who, once he gets over the interruption of his routine, realizes all that he has lost and decides to change his ways. As much as the moments Niko and Hirayama spend together are joyous, and as much as she offers to change his life, that’s not the story Perfect Days tells.
After two days together, a black chauffeured car stops in front of Hirayama’s apartment. It’s Niko’s mother, Hirayama’s sister, who has come to retrieve her daughter after Hirayama had notified her. Although Niko pleads with her uncle and asks to stay, Hirayama neither helps nor seeks a real conversation with her mother. When she asks him to visit their dying father, he declines, gives her a hug, cries, and continues with his life, having swallowed his feelings. As suddenly as the past appeared, Hirayama shuts it out, along with the challenges and alternatives it offers.
The scene is emblematic of Hirayama’s stifled relations with others. He is reserved yet approachable, functional yet pleasant. He goes to the public baths, never talking to other guests—who themselves always arrive chatting in pairs. He clearly pines for the owner of a bar he frequents but never dares to ask her out. In the end, he is cleaning, bathing, eating, and drinking alone. One could be forgiven for thinking that Hirayama is happy living a life of virtuous solitude. But is there enough to distinguish it from loneliness?
Another encounter seems to shake him even more. Toward the very end of the film, Hirayama catches a glimpse of his crush, the bar owner, hugging another man. Shaken and embarrassed, he flees to the riverside—after arming himself, unusually, with beer and cigarettes. Hirayama coughs like a first-time smoker, reverting to the habits of a life he’s presumably not lived for years. But the other man has followed Hirayama to explain, and surprises our protagonist with a candid and a heartfelt request.
As their formal conversation becomes more intimate and existential, the man asks Hirayama whether he thinks shadows are darker when they overlap. Uncharacteristically, Hirayama suggests they find out through a game he played as a child, inviting the man to appreciate the play of light and shadow together. Despite his lingering stoicism, we see Hirayama struggling with both his desire to connect with others and the pain of acknowledging that longing. It’s a rare moment of shared vulnerability in a life that otherwise made little place for it.
The film’s genius, its final scene, definitively confronts us with the ambiguity of Hirayama’s life and the inner drama his choices have wrought. It is surprising that few critics have grappled with the emotional upheaval that plays out on his face in this scene. Hirayama, having banished the interpersonal entanglements of the past days, is back behind the wheel, in control of his routine. But in one of few front-on close-ups of Hirayama’s face in the whole film, the camera finally stops showing what the character sees. Instead, as he plays Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” at sunrise, we are confronted with what Hirayama feels. Wenders’s protagonist is neither an archetype of enlightened mindfulness nor a hype man for a bourgeois escapism amidst the pressures of a neoliberal order. Hirayama’s life is still in motion, and we may hope that the same attentiveness will spur him to connect with, rather than merely contemplate, the people around him. Though this scene ends the film, we should not take it to be the end of his journey.
