'Perfect Days' (2023)

Kōji Yakusho's performance isn't just great; it's important

Today I’m going to share a passage from the novel “Like Rum-Drunk Angels” by Tyler Enfield with you all.

Imagine Francis wandering the markets of Santa Fe, no purpose in mind, pondering vaguely his future and its apparent absence of design, when he pauses in a shaft of pink sunlight to study the unexpected splendour of a discarded comb. It is strewn amid the filth of an open gutter, the fish heads and carrot tops, the effervescing sludge, and he is certain the comb is made of pure tortoiseshell. He crouches down to look closer, for he is appalled and euphoric. Suddenly he’s convinced all the world’s gladness can be explained by the three blonde hairs in a tortoiseshell comb in the gutters of a Santa Fe market. It has always been this way, and he is strangely relieved.

There’s two reasons I’m sharing this. The first is that there is no one alive that can comprehend how much I recommend this book, and so I figured I should offer whoever reads this review a fighting chance on that front. The second is that I could think of no better way to lead in to talking about Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days; a film whose energy is nothing short of essential (and I mean that as literally as one can).

Perfect Days stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner working in Tokyo’s Shibuya district who loves trees, music, photography, and books. The film offers us a glimpse into Hirayama’s routine over the course of a couple of days; a routine that’s defined by its simplicity in equal measure as its profundity.

Now, if someone had told me that one of the most staggeringly beautiful portraits of human potential could be found in a relatively plotless, disarmingly quiet co-production between Germany and Japan about a guy who cleans toilets, I would have leaned forward with powerful curiosity, because that’s precisely what Perfect Days wishes to be engaged with. More on that as we go on.

Key to the film’s raison d'être is Yakusho’s lead performance as Hirayama, who’s largely defined by the unceremonious joy and purpose he finds in everyday life. Pay attention to how Hirayama carries himself; he’s not particularly emotive, and yet Yakusho’s eyes convey a boundless interest in whatever he’s interacting with at the time. This is a man who lives alongside the world rather than concerns himself with it; he has no interest in taking up space that isn’t already his own, because he already has everything he needs by way of the act of experience. Hence his tendency to not speak very often; he wants to deliberately embrace every little piece of the world around him, and knows there is no fulfillment in receiving/forcing attention on himself for the sake of attention.

This leads us to Takashi, Hirayama’s toilet-cleaning coworker who is quite the opposite of Hirayama. He’s constantly trying to make conversation for no other reason than to make conversation, and has a habit of rating everything — from his chances with certain women to how his day is going — on a scale of 1 to 10.

That second habit is particularly curious, as it implies a subconscious obsession with hard quantification that runs counter to Hirayama’s heart-centric, mythopoeic way of being.

Consider as well Hirayama’s dreams; black-and-white puddles primarily filled with nature imagery. At one point in the film, Hirayama finds a folded-up piece of paper with a tic-tac-toe game written on it in one of the toilet stalls. The paper was left by an unseen stranger, and only has the middle space marked with an O. Hirayama marks another space with an X, puts it back, and the game continues over the course of the film. This tic-tac-toe game appears in the next dream he has after encountering the game for the first time.

In this way, we can understand that tic-tac-toe game in the same way that we understand nature; not a thing to question or prove something about, but to acknowledge and engage with. After all, if you take this unceremonious joy as your common denominator for interacting with the world, is there really any difference between a whimsical, spontaneous instance of tic-tac-toe, and a gorgeous flower that smells like sunshine?

As stated earlier, Perfect Days has very little dialogue, and this results in the dialogue that is present having that much more attention drawn to it. Nothing encapsulates this, nor gives Perfect Days such a gorgeous heft, better than the scene in which Hirayama and Tomoyama — a divorced man dying of cancer — are having drinks and cigarettes at a nearby riverbank.

Pay attention to every line exchanged by these two men in this scene. Prior to this scene, we see Tomoyama hugging his ex-wife, and he later tries to explain to Hirayama why he made a point to see her. He rhymes off a couple of reasons — an apology, a thank-you — before eventually admitting that he simply wanted to see her. This ties into Perfect Days’ thematic DNA perfectly; in an attempt to justify his feelings by quantifying a reason for them, Tomoyama betrays the purest essence of those feelings.

Tomoyama also muses on the revelation that he’s going to die without having seen much of the world. With this, consider how much Hirayama sees in his day-to-day in Shibuya as a toilet cleaner. Indeed, Perfect Days challenges us to rethink the act of seeing; the physical act of seeing more of the world does not automatically translate to the emotional act of seeing.

Space is space, but the meaning of that space — and our ability to extrapolate spiritual nutrition from it — hinges on us.

But perhaps most importantly, Perfect Days doesn’t pretend that Hirayama himself is some infallible would-be guru that has everything figured out. The news of his father’s imminent demise shakes him, particularly since it’s implied that the two of them had a very poor relationship. Pay attention to how Hirayama behaves in the hours after he learns of his father; his movements are less graceful, he pays less attention to things, and he shows — even voices — marked frustration.

Hirayama’s wondrous emotional capability that he shows on the daily necessarily stems from the exact same thing that makes that capability an imperfect one; Hirayama is human.

During the Hirayama-Tomoyama scene, Tomoyama wonders aloud if shadows are made darker if they overlap. As it’s the middle of the night at the pair are near some streetlights, Hirayama suggests they see for themselves. As they do this, Hirayama says something to the effect of “it needs to get darker to make sense.”

Indeed, there is nothing natural about highs without lows, and the absolute tidal wave of emotion that coats Hirayama’s face in the final scene is a further testament to that, in all its singular-but-plural beauty.

Honestly, to even try and communicate the merits of Perfect Days feels like a disservice to the film itself, and not because it’s one of those movies that’s simply so excellent as to be beyond words.

No, it’s because Perfect Days itself is, at its most basic, an ode to not needing to understand, but instead to simply be, like three blonde hairs in a tortoiseshell comb that encapsulate every shade of gladness on this Earth.

---