Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through

During his lunch breaks, Hirayama looks up at the trees, fascinated by the delicate dance of sunlight on the leaves, snapping photos of it with an old film camera. A title at the end of the movie defines the Japanese word komorebi, which refers to the way light and shadow filter through foliage—something that “only exists once, at that moment.” Hirayama’s black-and-white pictures, which he edits ruthlessly and keeps tucked away in meticulously organized boxes, all seem to be attempts to capture this impermanent phenomenon. He’s an artist, but we don’t sense that he will ever do anything with these photographs. They themselves are, in a way, impermanent. In the film’s periodic “dream installation” passages, orchestrated by Donata Wenders (the director’s wife and an artist in her own right), Hirayama’s photos are interspersed with images from his daily life—creating the only moments when the film seems to leave the material present. But unlike most dream sequences in cinema, these do not offer any clues about our hero’s psyche. If anything, they reflect a mind at ease with itself.

Though Perfect Days is about a man who cleans public bathrooms in one of the world’s largest metropolises, we never see much dirt or, well, anything else: no vomit or urine or feces. Perhaps this is an oversight. Perhaps the toilets in Tokyo really are that clean. Perhaps this is the result of a prenegotiated condition—after all, the film began life partly as a promotional endeavor.

Or perhaps something else is at work here. Wenders has talked about how, when he first arrived in Tokyo in May 2022 to discuss the project (Perfect Days was shot that fall), the city was coming out of a very long pandemic lockdown. He was encouraged, he says, by the feeling of community and kindness among the citizens as they took their city back. As Wenders described it in an interview: “They were doing it in such a beautiful, civilized way that I just loved . . . They had parties in the parks, and they enjoyed their city again.” Hirayama cleans these bathrooms not out of some narrow-minded sense of duty but because he is part of an ecosystem in which cleanliness is understood as a collective good instead of as the disgusting job of low-paid laborers. Perhaps we don’t see dirty bathrooms in Perfect Days because the whole point of the movie is that the world gives us back what we put into it.

In cinema, anonymity is usually a form of tragedy or a temporary cover for greatness. But Hirayama seems perfectly content with his unassuming routine, and Wenders films him with a subtle sense of awe. Watching him, we might feel envy for a man who has the time to fully enjoy his music and books and the pleasures of nature. Is such simplicity not the stuff of so many of our own dreams?

Is it not also the dream of so many of Wenders’ protagonists? The director was acclaimed early in his career for Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), a trilogy of road movies featuring alienated characters who shed their old lives and set out to find something indefinable. Road movies have since become a thing of the past, for the most part. “Traveling was once a privilege, and being on the road was a state of grace, and not that many people dared to take that liberty,” Wenders told me in 2015. “But today, anybody can book a flight to the U.S. and rent a car or bike and go down Route 66 or feel like in Easy Rider.” But while the road is no longer as resonant a metaphor as it once was, the seeking goes on, maybe now more than ever.

In that sense, Perfect Days feels like a summational film, an end point for all those early wanderers. Hirayama has found the presence that Wenders’ previous characters (and the director himself) were looking for. “Those [earlier] movies are about searchers, characters who are seeking, but they don’t find it. Hirayama is not searching,” Wenders has said. “All of my films are dealing with that question of how to live, even though for a long time I did not know that, because I was searching for answers too. Perfect Days is quite a precise answer . . . In many ways, Hirayama is a perfect example of how to live.”

Wenders thought of Perfect Days as a tribute to his hero, Yasujiro Ozu, and one can see the influence of the Japanese master in the film’s attention to quotidian details and the gentle cadence with which it unfolds. One can also imagine an Ozu-like family drama in Hirayama’s largely unrevealed past, a sliver of which emerges quietly in the second half of Perfect Days, when his teenage niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), suddenly shows up at his house after running away from home. She hints briefly at a dispute that led Hirayama himself to leave home many years ago. Later, Niko’s mother (Yumi Aso) arrives to collect her in a nice car with a private chauffeur, suggesting that perhaps Hirayama also comes from wealth. “Are you really cleaning toilets?” his sister asks, baffled and maybe a little embarrassed. We learn that Hirayama had some sort of conflict with his father, but this is all we get of his past. Wenders doesn’t dwell on it, nor does he suggest any great traumas or tragedies.

A conventional drama about a runaway teen going to live with her withdrawn uncle would surely end with her bringing him out of his shell and opening him up to the world. Instead, Niko cleans toilets with Hirayama and finds herself drawn to his life. When she asks if they can go to the ocean, he says that she can go next time. When she asks what he means by that, he replies, “Next time is next time. Now is now.” There is a hint of severity in his statement, a refusal to dream bigger. But these words are also a brief and beautiful expression of his principles. To live in the present, one must set aside both the past and the future.

Perfect Days is not Wenders’ first portrait of Tokyo. In 1985, he released Tokyo-ga, which is at once a meditation on Ozu’s work and a travelogue depicting the city. The film includes interviews with some of Ozu’s key collaborators, but perhaps its most telling moment is an odd interlude with Werner Herzog, who happens to be making a stopover in Tokyo on his way to Australia. Wenders’ New German Cinema colleague stridently holds forth about the impossibility of finding worthy images in such a built-up environment. “One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all,” he opines. Perhaps Herzog, too, is one of Wenders’ wanderers, looking for something “pure and clear and transparent” away from the hubbub of the world. Could the mythmaking director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo recognize the sublime glory of a man cleaning toilets?