There’s a particular unease that comes with watching a film marketed as a ‘celebration of simple living.’ When I first saw the promotional stills for Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – those sun-drenched frames of Kōji Yakusho’s toilet cleaner Hirayama smiling peacefully amidst Tokyo’s gleaming public restrooms – my skepticism kicked in hard. As someone who’s weathered enough faux-profound lifestyle films, I braced for another sanctimonious lecture about finding happiness in minimalism.
But here’s what the golden-hour marketing doesn’t show you: the scene where Hirayama’s hands tremble while lighting a cigarette after midnight, or the way he abruptly turns away from coworkers offering drinks. These moments reveal Wenders’ true project – not another Eat Pray Love for the Marie Kondo set, but a quietly radical examination of how we perform contentment while wrestling with very human fractures. The German director, known for his unflinching European new wave sensibilities, plants subtle landmines beneath the film’s serene surface.
What makes Perfect Days essential viewing isn’t its picture-perfect portrayal of Tokyo toilet maintenance (though those Shibuya stalls have never looked more cinematic). It’s how Wenders dismantles the Instagram-ready simplicity suggested by its promotion. Through Hirayama’s meticulously ordered routines – cassette tapes lined up like soldiers, plants watered with monastic precision – we gradually detect the outlines of something darker. The director later revealed these rituals were inspired by observing recovering alcoholics, a clue to the character’s unspoken backstory.
This tension between surface tranquility and underlying struggle creates the film’s magic. When Hirayama suddenly tears up listening to Lou Reed’s Perfect Day (the obvious yet perfect soundtrack choice), it hits harder than any overt drama could. Wenders trusts us to understand these cracks in the minimalist facade aren’t failures of the lifestyle, but proof of its authenticity. The movie’s power lies in what it refuses to explain – those mysterious late-night drives, the avoided phone calls, the way Yakusho’s phenomenal performance lets joy and sorrow occupy the same facial muscles.
By the third act, you realize those early promotional images were never false advertising, just incomplete ones. The sunlight in Hirayama’s world exists, but so do the shadows it casts. In an era where ‘slow living’ gets reduced to aesthetic inspo boards, Perfect Days offers something rare – a portrait of simplicity that acknowledges the complex humans attempting it.
The Lies in Sunlight: When Promotional Materials Don’t Tell the Whole Story
The promotional campaign for Perfect Days would have you believe this is a film about radiant contentment. Those carefully curated stills of Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama – smiling gently while cycling through Tokyo’s streets or gazing peacefully at sunlight filtering through trees – suggest another entry in the growing catalog of “mindfulness cinema.” At first glance, it appears to be a cinematic meditation on how cleaning toilets and listening to cassette tapes can lead to enlightenment.
But within the film’s first twenty minutes, director Wim Wenders begins dismantling these expectations. That beatific Hirayama from the posters? We see him finishing a night shift, lighting a cigarette in the blue-hour gloom, his face momentarily collapsing into exhaustion. The carefully composed Instagram-worthy frames of domestic tranquility? They’re punctuated by scenes where Hirayama avoids eye contact with coworkers or sits a beat too long at a bar after his third beer.
This isn’t accidental dissonance – it’s central to Wenders’ artistic statement. In interviews about Perfect Days, the German filmmaker has emphasized his fascination with “the shadows behind the sunlight.” The promotional materials show us the answer (a man who’s found peace in simplicity), while the film itself obsessively examines the question (what does that peace actually cost?).
Three key scenes exemplify this contrast:
- The Commute That Wasn’t Pictured: While ads featured Hirayama biking cheerfully to work, the film lingers on his return trips – shoulders slightly slumped, pausing sometimes to watch salarymen arguing outside an izakaya.
- The Rituals With Cracks: His morning routine (watering plants, choosing a cassette) appears meditative until we notice how his hands hesitate before selecting music – as if each choice carries unexpected weight.
- The Public Face vs Private Moments: That poster-perfect smile disappears when no one’s watching, replaced by something more complex and unnameable.
American audiences accustomed to Hollywood’s redemption arcs might find this approach unsettling. Where we expect transformation (the depressed cleaner who finds joy!), Wenders gives us subtle oscillations between contentment and something darker. The European New Wave influence shines through in these refusals – this isn’t a story about becoming happy, but about being human.
Tokyo itself becomes complicit in this deception. The city’s famously pristine public toilets (Hirayama’s workplace) symbolize the disconnect between polished surfaces and hidden labor. In one telling sequence, a wealthy woman compliments the restroom’s cleanliness without acknowledging the man who maintains it – a visual metaphor for how society romanticizes simplicity while ignoring those actually living it.
Wenders’ masterstroke lies in making both versions of Hirayama authentic. The smiling cyclist exists alongside the brooding night smoker, and neither feels false. This duality raises provocative questions about happiness narratives in cinema: Must we choose between misery porn and saccharine uplift? Perfect Days suggests a third path – one where light and shadow share the same frame, much like the dappled sunlight through trees that Hirayama photographs daily.
For viewers conditioned by a decade of “life-changing magic” minimalism content, this complexity might initially feel like a betrayal. But it’s precisely what makes Perfect Days more than another entry in the “healing film” genre. By resisting the urge to simplify its protagonist’s emotional landscape, the movie achieves something rare – a portrait of satisfaction that acknowledges all the quiet costs behind it.
The Dual Life of Hirayama: Contentment and Cracks
What first appears as a meditative portrait of minimalist living gradually reveals itself to be something far more textured in Perfect Days. Hirayama’s meticulously curated routines—watering his collection of potted seedlings, methodically cleaning Tokyo’s avant-garde public toilets, rewinding cassette tapes of 70s American rock—initially present as the idealized habits of someone who’s mastered the art of simple living. Yet Wim Wenders, with his characteristically European sensibility, layers these rituals with subtle tension that American audiences might miss if blinking too quickly.
The Weight of Rituals
There’s something almost liturgical about how Hirayama performs his daily tasks. The way he folds his work uniform each morning isn’t just neatness—it’s a compulsion. When we see him pause mid-cleaning to realign a toilet paper roll that’s already perfectly straight, we recognize these as the behaviors of someone clinging to order as emotional ballast. The film’s promotional materials highlighted these sequences as aspirational #SlowLiving moments, but Wenders shoots them with a quiet unease—the camera lingering just long enough for us to notice the white-knuckled grip on his scrub brush.
This duality becomes explicit in the cassette tape scenes. While marketing presented Hirayama’s vintage music collection as charming nostalgia, the film reveals it as something darker. His inability to tolerate digital music (shown when he abruptly removes earbuds a colleague offers) speaks less to retro aesthetics than to an obsessive need to control his sensory environment—a trait psychologists often associate with trauma survivors.
Emotional Fault Lines
The film’s most powerful moments come when this carefully constructed equilibrium fractures. There’s a scene where Hirayama, typically stoic while cleaning particularly challenging bathroom messes, suddenly slams his cleaning cart against a wall after encountering a minor obstruction. Later, we watch him weep silently in his truck to Lou Reed’s Perfect Day—not the cathartic crying of someone moved by beauty, but the shuddering release of someone who’s been holding something terrible at bay.
Wenders confirmed in interviews that these weren’t arbitrary character choices. The director drew inspiration from observing recovering alcoholics in Tokyo, particularly their reliance on rigid routines to avoid relapse. “The cleanliness obsession isn’t metaphorical,” he told IndieWire. “It’s what keeps him from the liquor store.” This grounding in real psychological struggle elevates Perfect Days beyond the realm of lifestyle porn into something genuinely profound about the price of self-containment.
The Ghost in the Routine
American viewers accustomed to more explicit backstory revelations might find the film’s restraint frustrating. We never see flashbacks of Hirayama’s presumed alcoholism or learn what traumatic event made him withdraw from society. Instead, Wenders trusts us to read between the lines of his protagonist’s actions—the extra beat before entering certain public restrooms, the way his hands shake when not occupied with work.
This approach creates fascinating tension with the film’s Japanese cultural context. Where Western narratives often demand psychological explanations, Perfect Days embraces mono no aware—the Japanese concept of appreciating life’s transience without demanding resolution. The result is a character study that feels simultaneously specific to Tokyo’s social isolation and universal in its portrait of how we all construct daily armor against our private pains.
For audiences seeking either straightforward inspiration or gritty realism, this balancing act may prove challenging. But for those willing to sit with ambiguity, Hirayama becomes one of recent cinema’s most authentic embodiments of how happiness and hurt aren’t opposites—they’re roommates in the small apartment of an ordinary life.
Wenders’ Tokyo Experiment: When European New Wave Meets Japanese Mono no Aware
Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days presents a fascinating cultural alchemy, where the German director’s European sensibilities collide with distinctly Japanese aesthetics. The film’s visual language becomes a silent conversation between two cinematic traditions – the restless mobility of European new wave meeting the contemplative stillness of mono no aware (the Japanese awareness of impermanence).
The Poetry of Fixed Frames
Wenders makes a radical departure from his signature roaming camera movements seen in classics like Wings of Desire. Instead, Perfect Days employs prolonged static shots that transform mundane actions – folding a futon, scrubbing a toilet bowl, watering plants – into hypnotic rituals. These unbroken takes create what I call “meditative realism,” where time stretches to reveal the hidden rhythms in Hirayama’s routine.
The 4-minute sequence of Hirayama methodically cleaning a Tokyo public toilet (shot from three fixed angles) exemplifies this approach. Unlike the floating camerawork in Paris, Texas that follows characters through landscapes, these locked-down frames force us to sit with the protagonist’s isolation. The visual restraint mirrors Hirayama’s emotional containment – until the rare moments when the camera finally moves, signaling his suppressed feelings breaking through.
Cultural Translation Without Appropriation
European filmmakers approaching Japanese subjects often fall into orientalist traps, but Wenders demonstrates remarkable cultural sensitivity. His Tokyo feels authentically lived-in rather than exotified. The film avoids fetishizing cherry blossoms or neon signs, instead finding beauty in convenience store bento boxes and the geometric patterns of public restrooms.
This authenticity stems from Wenders’ collaboration with Japanese creatives, including co-writer Takuma Takasaki. Their partnership ensures the film’s European perspective never overpowers its Japanese soul. The result is what critic Donald Richie might call “a view from the bridge” – observing Japanese life with outsider clarity while maintaining insider respect.
The Berlin-Tokyo Connection
Fans of Wenders’ German period will spot fascinating contrasts. Where The American Friend used restless handheld shots to convey existential anxiety, Perfect Days employs tripod stillness to depict hard-won peace. The circling angels in Wings of Desire become Hirayama’s cassette tapes – both recording devices preserving fragile human moments.
Yet beneath this apparent calm, Wenders smuggles in his trademark themes. The Tokyo toilets serve the same symbolic function as Paris, Texas’ desert motels – transient spaces where damaged souls temporarily dock. Hirayama’s vinyl collection echoes Lisbon Story’s preoccupation with analog technology in a digital world.
This chapter of Wenders’ filmography proves the director hasn’t abandoned his European roots, but learned to let them breathe through Japanese forms. The film’s greatest achievement might be making Ozu-esque restraint feel as radical today as Wenders’ early experiments with movement felt in the 1970s.
The Janitor, Cassettes & Tokyo: Overlooked Urban Icons
Hirayama’s daily rhythm as a Tokyo toilet cleaner forms the film’s most potent visual metaphor. In a city obsessed with surface perfection, his vocation embodies society’s unspoken contradictions – maintaining pristine public spaces while occupying its most invisible social stratum. Wenders frames these cleaning rituals with monastic reverence: the circular motions of his brush against porcelain, the exact folding of cleaning cloths, the quiet satisfaction of removing stubborn stains. These aren’t menial tasks but sacred ceremonies in the religion of small things.
The Alchemy of Dignity
Tokyo’s award-winning public toilets (designed by architects like Tadao Ando) become ironic temples where Hirayama performs his secular ministry. The film highlights this paradox through visual composition – his hunched figure reflected in spotless mirrors, dwarfed by avant-garde structures that celebrate design while obscuring their maintainers. This mirrors Japan’s broader cultural tension between technological futurism and human labor’s diminishing visibility.
Wenders borrows from Italian neorealism’s tradition of finding nobility in menial work, but updates it for Japan’s service economy. Unlike Pasolini’s Roman street sweepers who commanded cinematic space, Hirayama moves through Tokyo like a ghost. His blue uniform blends into the city’s palette, noticed only when something goes wrong – a subtle commentary on how society acknowledges essential workers.
Analog Soul in a Digital City
Hirayama’s cassette tapes (carefully labeled and organized) function as tactile anchors in Tokyo’s virtual sea. The film’s soundtrack – from Lou Reed to Nina Simone – doesn’t just establish mood but serves as narrative counterpoint. When Hirayama rewinds a tape after his niece accidentally records over it, we witness more than nostalgia – it’s resistance against algorithmic curation and digital disposability.
The tapes also reveal character depth through their imperfections: the occasional warble of stretched magnetic tape, the hiss between tracks, the physical act of flipping sides. These sensory details contrast sharply with Tokyo’s sleek convenience stores and cashless payments, positioning Hirayama as an accidental rebel preserving analog humanity.
Toilets as Microcosms
Each public restroom becomes a self-contained social universe. The salaryman who vomits after drinking, the teenager who leaves graffiti, the wealthy woman who drops her ring – these micro-interactions build a mosaic of urban life without exposition. Wenders uses the toilet’s inherent intimacy (a place where people reveal unguarded moments) to explore themes of privacy and connection in megacities.
The film’s most poignant social commentary emerges in these spaces. When Hirayama finds a lost child in a restroom, his gentle care contrasts with the parents’ delayed arrival, hinting at societal fractures. Later, his silent reaction to discovering drug paraphernalia suggests complex backstory rather than simple judgment.
Why These Symbols Matter
These elements coalesce into Wenders’ central thesis: true mindfulness isn’t about Instagram-worthy simplicity but engaging fully with life’s messiness. The toilet cleaner who finds meaning in repetition, the outdated technology that carries emotional weight, the pristine spaces that host human frailty – together they dismantle romanticized minimalism.
For viewers navigating their own urban labyrinths, these symbols offer alternative ways to measure fulfillment. Not in curated possessions or productivity hacks, but in the quiet mastery of small rituals and the courage to face what society flushes away.
Who Should Watch This Film? (And How to Watch It)
The Perfect Audience for Imperfect Days
If you’re tired of films that spoon-feed happiness or offer neatly packaged life lessons, Perfect Days might be your cinematic antidote. This isn’t a movie for those seeking escapism or easy answers—it’s for viewers who appreciate when a film respects the complexity of human experience.
Ideal viewers include:
- Art house film enthusiasts who enjoy European new wave aesthetics blended with Japanese storytelling
- Psychology-minded audiences interested in subtle character studies
- Urban sociologists curious about Tokyo’s invisible workforce
- Anyone skeptical of the ‘minimalism equals happiness’ narrative flooding lifestyle media
How to Approach the Viewing Experience
- Abandon expectations of plot: This is a mood piece, not a story-driven narrative. The film’s power lives in its quiet moments—the way Hirayama folds his work uniform, his precise toilet-cleaning rituals, the changing light through his apartment windows.
- Watch for contradictions: Notice how Wenders frames Hirayama’s seemingly content routines against his sudden emotional outbursts. The magic happens in these juxtapositions.
- Embrace the pace: With its long takes and minimal dialogue, the film demands patience. Consider watching in one uninterrupted sitting to fully absorb its rhythm.
If You Liked… (Similar Film Recommendations)
For those who appreciate Perfect Days’ unique blend of contemplative pacing and urban character study:
- Paterson (2016) – Another blue-collar poet finding beauty in routine, though with more overt romanticism
- Drive My Car (2021) – Japanese slow cinema exploring grief through mundane details
- The Straight Story (1999) – Wenders’ fellow road movie about ordinary extraordinary journeys
- Columbus (2017) – Architectural beauty meeting human stillness
- Nomadland (2020) – Another unflinching look at invisible workers, though more politically overt
Each of these films shares Perfect Days’ commitment to finding profundity in everyday struggles, though none quite replicate Wenders’ particular balance of European sensibility and Japanese setting.
Final Viewing Tips
- Watch the light: Cinematographer Franz Lustig uses Tokyo’s natural light as emotional punctuation
- Listen closely: The cassette tape soundtrack isn’t just nostalgia—it’s a character trait
- Post-viewing discussion: The film lingers. Plan time afterward to process what you’ve experienced
This isn’t a film that shouts its themes. Like Hirayama’s carefully pruned trees, its meaning grows quietly in the spaces between actions. Come prepared to watch closely, think deeply, and perhaps see your own routines in a new light.
Finding Truth in the Ordinary: Why Perfect Days Stays With You
What lingers after the credits roll isn’t the golden sunlight filtering through Tokyo’s trees, but the quiet weight of Hirayama’s unspoken struggles. Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days refuses to offer easy answers about happiness—instead, it plants questions that grow in the dark corners of your mind long after leaving the theater. This isn’t accidental; it’s the film’s greatest strength.
The Gift of Unresolved Tension
The genius of Perfect Days lies in its resistance to categorization. Unlike traditional healing films that tie narratives with neat bows, Wenders leaves Hirayama’s story deliberately open. We see his meticulous toilet-cleaning rituals, his cassette tape obsessions, the way he photographs sunlight—but also the tremor in his hands during silent meals, the abrupt exits from social situations, that one startling moment when tears fall onto his polishing cloth. These aren’t flaws in a minimalist paradise; they’re proof of life’s irreducible complexity.
Tokyo itself becomes a character in this tension. The gleaming public toilets Hirayama maintains—architectural marvels of glass and steel—contrast sharply with his tiny, dated apartment. His vintage music collection feels like rebellion in a city obsessed with the new. Wenders frames these contradictions not as problems to solve, but as essential textures of human existence.
Beyond Perfect vs. Broken
Modern storytelling often forces false binaries: either transcendent enlightenment or gritty despair. Perfect Days demolishes this divide. In one particularly revealing scene, Hirayama smiles genuinely at a child’s drawing left in a toilet stall, then moments later drinks alone while staring at a peeling wall. The film suggests that wholeness isn’t about eliminating shadows, but learning their shapes.
This nuanced approach makes Perfect Days uniquely valuable for our era of wellness industry oversimplifications. When social media peddles #CleanLiving as cure-alls, the film serves as necessary counterprogramming—not against simplicity itself, but against the lie that any lifestyle can sterilize life’s inherent messiness.
A Mirror for Different Viewers
What you see in Hirayama’s story likely reflects where you stand:
- Minimalism enthusiasts may initially relate to his curated routines, then confront their own avoidance mechanisms
- Cinephiles will savor Wenders’ Ozu-inspired compositions that turn toilet cleaning into meditative art
- Urban dwellers recognize the loneliness/connection paradox of city life
The film’s open ending invites this multiplicity. That final shot—Hirayama driving away, his expression unreadable—doesn’t tell us whether he’s found peace or simply continues his dance with darkness. Either interpretation holds truth.
The Question Worth Keeping
Perhaps Perfect Days succeeds most by leaving us slightly unsettled. In a culture addicted to resolution, it’s radical to create art that says, “This isn’t about answers.” As the lights come up, you’re left not with closure, but with something far more valuable—a deeper set of questions about what “enough” really means, and whether chasing perfect days might make us miss the imperfect ones that actually sustain us.
After all, when sunlight hits a bathroom mirror just right, even a cleaning rag can look like gold.
