And what I’m trying to say
Is that nobody ever had a rainbow, baby
Until he had the rain
Los Angeles
It is Wednesday, May 31st, 2023. It is the last day of my lease in Los Angeles. I am lying on the tile floor of the bathroom in my apartment. I am attempting to fix the lock on my bathroom door. It has been broken for two years. For some reason I cannot articulate, I have not asked my landlord to fix it. I have not asked them to fix the broken sink, or the shower vividly stained from my orange medicated dandruff shampoo, or even the toilet. I suspect I am leaving LA for good.
In two hours my friend, writing partner, and failed company co-owner is going to come over and help me hurl my $2,000 lumpy mattress into the alleyway. I give up on fixing the door. Everything has become large, unwieldy; I can no longer hold all of the things that I need to do, or feel, or think. I take the remaining kitchen utensils that I haven’t been able to give away and stuff them into a black trash bag. I walk down the back stairs of my apartment complex into the Burbank alley. I throw the bag hard into the designated dumpster and walk to Trader Joe’s to buy a sheet cake. I don’t speak to anyone. I don’t know what there is to say.
Tokyo
Eight days before this, Wim Wenders’ 23rd feature narrative film, Perfect Days, premiered at Cannes. Perfect Days is a portrait of a man, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), who we learn is a toilet cleaner. His occupation—one that he seems supremely content with—is the extensive cleaning of some of the 17 redesigned, architecturally renowned public toilets of the Tokyo Toilet Project. Hirayama scrubs, sprays, wipes, and restocks these toilets with a steadfast dedication that could strike a viewer as worrisome. For reasons that are maybe already apparent, I become obsessed with this film.
Perfect Days is divided into three structural reflections. The first 20 minutes illustrate Hirayama’s regimented routine. The middle of the film, roughly 45 minutes, shows us the friction the outside world exerts on this routine. The final 50 minutes destroys Hirayama’s routine entirely; forces outside of his control collide with his environment, careening him into an emotional landscape for which he is completely unprepared.
Hirayama is initially a cipher. Showing us a shot of Hirayama’s subtle smile, his innumerable keys, and his spartan apartment, Wenders presents him as a puzzle for the viewer. We see Hirayama awaken, prepare, embark on his day, finish his work, clean up, get his dinner, sleep, dream, and begin again. As this structure is repeated, shortened in editing, emphasized against the forces of the outside world, we’re drawn into an understanding of the man and the community he inhabits.
I am repeatedly drawn to repetition in film. In Groundhog Day (1993), it represents the effort required to create a new life, to change one’s inherent nature. In Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the routine is a shroud of protection, the structured life that protects Jeanne from the trauma of the world; when that routine is shattered, she is no longer able to maintain the daily repetition that has allowed her to survive for so long. In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), repeated phrases become motifs of memory, creating for the audience a world of dream and remembrance that threatens their understanding of the film that’s being shown.
Examinations of repetition inevitably involve time, the unavoidable animus of cinema. In Paul Schrader’s book Transcendental Style In Film, he notes that altered time in film can force the audience to re-engage with their own lives by providing them an uninterrupted moment of watching—like the four-minute sequence of the maid in Umberto D. (1952) attempting to strike a match several times on the wall stove. The banal routine of the maid, the subject of several essays, allows us an extreme amount of time with the character. When she begins to weep while grinding coffee, we’ve never been closer to a person we’ve never met.
Where Perfect Days deviates from other films about repetition and isolation is in its vividly-drawn portrait of a man who has chosen a small and controlled life, yet at every turn becomes further enmeshed in the matrix of humanity. Hirayama’s world has become more—not less—community-driven in its austerity, and Wenders shows us this dynamic at every turn. Here, living in a society is not an albatross around the neck, but instead a vibrant and unassailable part of being human. Even the man who cleans the toilets, our Tokyo Sisyphus, is confronted with his place in the tapestry of humanity almost every moment of his day.
Wenders opened Tokyo-Ga (1995)—his documentary about seminal Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu—with a statement about what he sees as fcinema’s true purpose:
“…to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image, in which he not only recognizes himself but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.”
Early in Perfect Days, Hirayama’s co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) tells him, “Take it easy, it’s getting dirty again anyway.” Which of course it is. But Hirayama continues, Hirayama cleans.
If there’s a sky,
I don’t need anything
Los Angeles
It is Tuesday, March 10th, 2020. I have just started a production company in LA, the culmination of five years of saving and planning. All of my resources, talents, and self-worth are tied up in this endeavor. Tomorrow, the World Health Organization will declare a pandemic.
Two things held true about my apartments in Los Angeles: they were always carpeted—so long trails of dirty-footed traffic would start to show on the weave—and they all had huge, sliding, mirrored closet doors in their bedrooms, trapping you in a sort of specimen box, your dirty carpet, piles of clothing, and unwashed sheets reflected right back at yourself. For me, living in Los Angeles and the years that have followed were/are an experiment in self-reflection and examination. Why did I live like that? In retrospect, how was I even living like that?
Living alone, with no partner and a business that had collapsed, I was a prisoner to a strange routine: wake up, water the plants, walk to the Ralphs, read the news, play video games until I didn’t have to think about my life, and then go to bed. Books and movies that I should’ve been absorbing and career moves that I should’ve been focusing on went unrealized. Mixers, meetings, self-promotion—all of the things that I needed to do in the world of LA to be successful—collapsed out from under me. The routine was all that sustained me; the routine required isolation; the isolation became the routine.
Tokyo
Two visitations occur in the final third of Perfect Days, alterations of Hirayama’s routine which play upon the themes established in the beginning of the film. Now that we know Hirayama and see ourselves in his reflection, we see two pivotal events in the second week that break him from this routine and push him out of his carefully structured isolation.
The first occurs when his niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), comes to visit. She has run away from her domineering mother, Hirayama’s sister, Keiko (Yumi Asō), and has decided to use her uncle as a safe haven. This upends Hirayama’s routine, sending him to sleep in the storage closet and forcing him to talk more than we’ve seen in the entire preceding hour. We realize, by watching Niko watch her uncle, that we’ve been in the same role since the film began. We see Hirayama looking at things, watching reflections, looking at people, attempting to be taught by the world around him. We see Hirayama performing the first duty of the artist—namely, to look with intention. The protagonist reflects and the viewer is reflected through the protagonist, a figure made up of the intersecting lines of nature and industry and unexpected beauty.
When Hirayama is treated with disrespect by a girl in a rush to use the bathroom, Niko is appalled, looking at her uncle with deep confusion and shame. Hirayama, however, just smiles and laughs, as if to say, Aren’t people funny? Isn’t the way we live absurd and unpredictable and beautiful? After a moment, she smiles at him, because of course it is. Niko’s experience watching her uncle mirrors the audience’s slow process of understanding him. Now that we’ve seen what makes Hirayama tick, we want Niko to have her own revelation too, to see what we see in him.
After Hirayama takes a picture of the komorebi in the park, Niko asks, “Is that tree your friend?” The question catches Hirayama by surprise, much as the entire visit has taken him by surprise; he decides that it is his friend. Niko’s arrival has forced Hirayama to step into a different role. In addition to living his life, he now must also explain it—or at least answer the questions that Niko throws his way. Demonstration is somewhat inevitable, as Hirayama shows her how to use the cassette player, lends her a book, demonstrates his mopping system, and finally ascribes a special importance to the moment of the now, the present. “Next time is next time,” he says; “now is now.”
Niko’s visit with her uncle ends almost abruptly as it began. “The world is made up of many different worlds,” Hirayama tells Niko. “Some are connected, and some are not.” Hirayama’s sister appears, chauffeured by her luxury car, to collect her daughter. Again, the idea of obligation and community emerges. Hirayama was obligated to call his sister and arrange the return of her runaway child, but Wenders puts the contrasts of their two worlds on full display. Flatly framed against each other, the two disconnected siblings are bathed in contrasting colors of light as they stand separated by time, social structure, and the frame of the shot: Hirayama in the calming light of his home, the small apartment behind him, and his sister with the expensive car and the red light. Only at the very end of the scene, where Hirayama reaches out to embrace his sister and she returns the embrace with surprise, do we see the intersection of these two worlds.
The second visitor from another world appears at Hirayama’s favorite bar. Hirayama has arrived earlier than normal, unable to engage in his routine after the disruption of Niko’s visit and his meeting with his sister. There, he encounters a strange man embracing “Mama,” the proprietress of the bar, played by the indomitable Enka singer Sayuri Ishikawa. Hirayama retreats almost instinctually, his routine, controlled life endangered by this outsider. He buys three beers and a pack of cigarettes and heads to the river.
The man, however, finds him anyway. His name is Tomoyama (Tomokazu Miura), “Mama’s” ex-husband, and he is dying from cancer. The two men stand and stare out over the river; their interaction is awkward, halting. Hirayama is unsure of what solace he can offer the man other than his spare beer and a cigarette. As the full weight of this dying man’s alienation is laid bare, Hirayama responds as we would hope any compassionate person would. He tries to connect, offering to transform Tomoyama’s idle thinking about shadows into reality, turning his question into an impromptu science demonstration, and then a game of shadow tag.
Can these two men understand each other? Can they connect? Hirayama reaches out with his shadow and touches Tomoyama. Connection in this way is possible. Even this reflection of light can be used to touch another human being from the right angle, with the right idea. All people are reachable, after all. Despite the gulfs of communication, the protections of routine, everyone and everything is in it together. The work of community—of connection—continues. The toilet gets dirty, then someone cleans it, then it gets dirty again, then someone cleans it…
You’re going to reap
Just what you sow…
– Lou Reed
Los Angeles
It is Friday, May 12th, 2023. It is my walkthrough with the building manager. I try to avoid talking about the bathroom. I try to avoid even looking in its direction. The building manager asks me if I have any fun plans for my last month in LA. No, I say.
What I see in Perfect Days, Wenders’ “true and valid image,” is a man who is healing himself through intentionality, who allows himself to be in the world and one with it. A man who is kind to the world because he has come to understand that it’s all one—the trees and the people and Hirayama and the Tokyo Toilets. All of these small worlds together, making one larger world, made up of all of us and everything else that is. This revelation can be shown to anyone and should be.
What emerges from Wenders’ portrait of Hirayama is an understanding that the bonds of living in this world are inescapable. There is no way to disconnect yourself from the reflections you see every day in the bathroom mirror: society is its own reflective formation, sunlight bouncing off the water. How, then, can we reckon with this inescapable community of everything?
Tokyo
On repeat viewings the entanglement that forms the foundation of Perfect Days is impossible to ignore. Every morning, after leaving his apartment, Hirayama gets a coffee from the vending machine at his parking spot. Once we understand Wenders’ themes, even this small action transforms into an irrefutable reminder of community. We’ve watched Hirayama in his acts of maintenance for the entire movie, so we have to ask ourselves: who fills up that vending machine? Who cleans it?
Characters recur as well. An unnamed office worker continues to be seen by Hirayama at the park, sad, wet eyes staring back as she eats her sandwich. An unhoused man, played by experimental dancer, director, and actor Min Tanaka, encounters Hirayama several times throughout the film, their two worlds intersecting through their love of trees. His regular server at the underground soba shop, the proprietor of the bookshop, the owner of the camera store—all these people who appear alongside Hirayama’s path become crucial companions. His world is connected to their worlds, if only in a small way, extending the web of humanity beyond the shape of just one man.
Wenders goes to lengths to show us that Hirayama is not a saint, just a person. When Takashi quits abruptly, Hirayama resents the extra shifts of the Tokyo Toilet cleaning. He clearly doesn’t know what to say to the sad office worker in the park, or to Aya when she starts to cry in his van. Even so, Hirayama is perhaps too content to be real, an idealized fiction of the contentment of a small life.
In his interview for the Criterion release of Perfect Days, Wenders says that Hirayama has embarked on a journey to change his life, and has decided on a new path for himself after reaching a point of despair. That he endeavors now to live simply and pursue a life of service. Crucially, Wenders says, Hirayama takes himself less seriously—which Kôji Yakusho shows throughout the film by breaking into an often silent grin at both his own actions and those of the people around him. He takes his daily life, his place in the world, his triumphs, and his failures less seriously. He takes his despair less seriously…
New York
It is Wednesday, July 12th, 2023. I am in New York, settled (more or less) into a renovated storage building next to my parents’ house. I am unloading the last of my possessions from the U-Haul Pod into which I’d shoved everything from my previous life that would fit. 257 cubic feet of treasured junk; misshapen objects, taped into moving blankets from Harbor Freight. Relics from seven years of living on the West Coast, literal baggage that I am unwrapping. Books, tapes, movies from another life. I receive a text from the new tenant of my old apartment.
Photographs in hand, Hirayama bends over a pair of tin boxes. With practiced, detached focus, he sorts through the photos, separating them into a pile to save—images captured from the world that he wishes to hold on to—and a stack of unwanted images, which he rips in half. The decision comes quickly, no pondering or agonizing. The moment he once captured with his camera has already passed; all that remains in this representation, frozen in time. Carrying the boxes to the closet, he slides open the door, revealing dozens of similar boxes stretching back into the dark reaches of the space.
It is Thursday, March 20th, 2025. I am writing this essay and I remember that I have three undeveloped disposable cameras from my last week in Los Angeles. I get them rush-developed to serve as headers for the sections I’m considering. Out of 76 photos, 44 of them feature my index finger covering a portion of the lens. A classic problem, or so people keep telling me, of the viewfinder on disposable cameras not showing the actual view of the lens—something you can only learn by taking the photos in the first place, staying present in the moment of capture.
There’s nothing that can be done about these pictures that I took two years ago. There’s only pictures of the future now, and the moments in which they will be captured. Next time is next time. Now is now. I grin, and I laugh.
