Last week I saw Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. On paper, nothing happens. Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, wakes, waters his plants, drives to work with a cassette in the player, cleans, eats lunch under the same tree, reads, sleeps, and starts again. And yet it holds you completely.
A landscape called Tokyo
Wenders has always been a filmmaker of landscapes. In Paris, Texas the desert is almost a character: wide, silent, unforgiving, and mirroring the inner state of a man who has lost his way. In Perfect Days he does the same with Tokyo. The city is not a backdrop but a landscape: the underpasses, the light, the quiet corners of a metropolis where Hirayama carves out his own territory.
This is also a return. Tokyo-Ga, which Wenders shot in 1983 and which screened at Cannes in 1985, is a documentary about the director Yasujirō Ozu, whom he reveres. Wenders called it a “diary on film”: he interviews people from Ozu’s circle, such as his cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta and the actor Chishū Ryū, but he also simply looks at the Tokyo of the early eighties, with its pachinko halls and plastic food displays. The homage did not end there. Hirayama’s name is itself a nod to Ozu, and the calm attention to small routines in Perfect Days feels like a continuation of that tribute, forty years later. Wenders looks at this city the way he once looked at Texas, with patience and without judgment.
A craft, not a job
That absence of judgment extends to Hirayama himself. The camera never pities him, and it never admires him from above either. It simply stays with him while he checks the corners with a small mirror, for no one’s applause. The Greeks called this techne, craft as a form of knowing. For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) is not a mood but an activity, something you do well. Hirayama is happy because he practises attention, not because he owns anything.
Two ways of looking: the glass and the camera
One parallel stayed with me. In Paris, Texas, Travis speaks to Jane through the glass of a peep-show booth, close and unreachable at once. Hirayama has his own kind of glass: the viewfinder of the small camera with which he photographs the light through the leaves, the komorebi. In both films, looking happens through a frame, at a distance, and the distance becomes a form of tenderness. Travis must talk to the glass before he can talk to a person. Hirayama photographs a tree, because the tree asks nothing of him.
The analogue life as a choice
His world is deliberately small: cheap secondhand paperbacks, poetry and literature, and above all the cassettes. Seventies music on tape is more than nostalgia. A cassette forces you to commit and listen to a side from beginning to end. For me it brings back childhood, when a tape was a small treasure you rewound with a pencil. Hirayama’s tapes show us how he lives: slowly, with intention, one thing at a time.
What Lou Reed knew
The title comes from Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”, and that matters. The song seems gentle, but listeners have always sensed a shadow under it, a happiness that is fragile or borrowed. Wenders keeps that ambiguity alive. In the final shot, as Nina Simone sings, Hirayama’s face moves between joy and sorrow, and the film refuses to tell us which one wins.
A monk without a monastery
Then there is his niece. She arrives at his door, having fled the wealthy, status-driven life of her mother, Hirayama’s sister. He takes her in, and for a few days she shares his rhythm, even cycling through the city beside him. But in the end he calls his sister to come and fetch her. It is a quietly revealing moment: not everyone is allowed, or able, to live the way he has chosen. The economist Amartya Sen described freedom as a matter of capability, the real possibility to choose a life, not merely the absence of obstacles. Hirayama’s way of life is open to him; for a young girl it may not yet be.
I see in Hirayama something of a monk: a man living by a rule. Zen even has a name for it, samu, work as spiritual practice, where sweeping a floor is meditation. And perhaps that is why he goes to the bathhouse every day after work: to wash the day, and with it a little of society, off his skin. It is a ritual of purification, as old as the monastic traditions.
But the comparison has a limit. A monk leaves the world and is carried by a community, a tradition and a monastery. Hirayama has none of these. He still pays rent, answers to his sister, and shares the bathhouse with strangers. He is a monk without a monastery, and perhaps that is harder.
A caveat worth making
The film is also easy to romanticise. It glides past the precarity of low-paid work, and the hints of a more privileged family past suggest his simplicity is partly chosen, which is exactly what the niece scene reveals. The Tokyo toilets we see are also architectural showpieces, not the average public restroom. Perfect Days is a beautiful argument, but an argument all the same.
Repetition as freedom
Our culture treats repetition as the enemy: optimise, escape, upgrade. Wenders suggests the opposite. Hirayama’s days repeat, but they are never the same, because he sees the light as new each time.
Repetition also means structure, and structure gives him safety. Within that frame he can prosper: he is free to read his books, to listen to his music, to visit the restaurants he likes. His life may look simple and sober from the outside, but perhaps he has exactly what he needs, the opportunity to choose.
That may also be the key to the image of him on his bicycle. The car is simply a tool he needs for his work. Everywhere else, on any day of the week, he rides through the city on two wheels, and even his niece joins him. The bicycle moves at the pace of its rider, goes where he decides, and needs nothing but his own balance. A routine, in this view, is not a cage but a frame you build so that attention, and choice, can move freely inside it. For anyone who values autonomy, there is something quietly radical in that.
I left the cinema wanting to listen more carefully, read slowly and look up at the trees. That may be the best thing a film can do.
What’s the soundtrack of your perfect day?