Perfect Days is a Japanese film made by a German new wave director Wim Wenders. The backstory is that Wim Wenders was invited to Tokyo to see a public toilet project where the toilet installations are more like artwork with fanciful designs. Instead of a documentary or short film, the director decided to make a feature film starring well known Japanese actor Koji Yakusho as Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner.

The film is structured around Hirayama’s daily routine. He rises before dawn to the sound of the street sweeper’s old fashioned broom. He neatly folds his sleeping pad and his comforter and places them in the corner of his humble but neat apartment. He trims his moustache. He goes outside and looks at the sky and sighs if there is rain or smiles if it is clear. He buys a coffee from a vending machine and gets into his cleaner’s van where he picks out a 1970’s cassette that he plays as he sees Tokyo’s Skytree tower on his morning commute. He performs his job with tranquil thoroughness, evoking the Japanese concept of a skokunin, a master craftsman overtones of nature and Zen.

Certainly the first pass through feels like a celebration of D.T. Suzuki, Marie Kondo, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and so on. It fits neatly into a conception of Japanese culture as a bastion of neatness, efficiency, meditation that is put in contrast with the hustle and bustle of the West. The reviews that I have read concentrate on this aspect of the film. However, I believe that the film intentionally undermines this concept of Japanese culture as it shows us more of Hirayama’s life.

The narrative structure of a day of the life of Hirayama provides a framework for the rest of the film but also offers variations that show other aspects of his character that do not fit neatly into the stereotypical Japanese man that he initially appears to be. The various days introduce a cast of characters that I would divide into peripheral and major. The peripheral characters are his acquaintances, a homeless man in the park, a mysterious game of tic-tac-toe played with a slip of paper left in a bathroom, the old men in the public bathhouse and another set of old men in his favorite bar. The major characters that offer more insight into his character are his younger, modern, unmotivated, disorganized, but charismatic colleague Takashi and his girlfriend Aya, his runaway niece Niko and her mother/his sister Keiko, “Mama” who is the owner of his favorite bar and her ex-husband. As he encounters each of these major characters, his routine becomes disturbed, and he is unable to maintain his usual sense of imperturbability.

During the day he takes photos of a tree at a Shinto shrine where he eats lunch. It is his hobby, as revealed on his day off, where he develops the week’s roll of film and buys a new one, and sorts through the photos, throwing away bad ones and keeping the good ones in metal tins labelled with the month and year. At night his dreams are shown in black and white and often feature the dappled light through the trees mingling with images from his day and the first thing he does in the morning is water seedlings from the tree, so this is shown as an importance aspect of his life.

The women in the story have a particular emotional impact on him. A feeling of desire long past symbolized by a kiss on the cheek from Ayo, the lack of children and a family life shown by Niko, the estrangement from his own family revealed by his sister Keiko, and the possibility of companionship at his age by the bar owner Mama. The story comes to a head as he comes across Mama embracing a man at the bar, which causes him to retreat to the riverbank to drink and smoke alone. He is visited there by the man, who turns out to be the owner’s ex-husband, who is dying from cancer and entrusts Mama to him. He denies being in a relationship with her but the next day his routine drive to work becomes the final scene of the film. He listens to music while offering the audience a long close up of his face which seems to be crying and smiling at the same time, or cycling between the two expressions. It seems to call back to the dappled light through the tree at the Shinto shrine which in a way, represents his life.

My overall takeaway from this film is that the main character, far from being a satisfied Zen monk, is actually rather socially isolated and extremely lonely. He barely speaks, a characteristic of a man who is often alone. He spends time with acquaintances but he is not close with any of them. He seems to want to connect with others as his colleagues Takashi does so easily, but he cannot. 

In my view, the end of the film underscores the loneliness that lies just beneath the superficial satisfaction of his daily routine, mingling and alternating with it in his final facial expressions like dappled light through his favorite tree. In this way I think the film subverts Japanese cultural stereotypes and undermines Zen Buddhist concepts. The loneliness and isolation of older people in Japan is a crisis of modernity perhaps made worse by their traditional culture, and this film depicts it perfectly.