You Do What You Must Do And You Do It Well: The Wisdom of Perfect Days.

Meditation is a solitary practice that helps you connect with yourself and, in turn, the world and the people in it. Sitting alone under a tree in an eternal state of bliss like some parody of a holy man is not the goal.

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) sits under a lot of trees. He savors the light passing through their canopies, taking pictures with his 35mm camera and filing away the good ones in his closet. Who will ever see them is an interesting question. He's a handsome, meek man straddling 60 who lives alone and, over two days, doesn't say more than three words to a single person.

He works for Tokyo Toilets, a project that enlisted 17 of Japan's most acclaimed architects to create innovative and inviting public restrooms in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district. Hirayama treats each one like a work of art, cleaning them with the devoutness of a monk; bowing before their toilets, he scrubs with gloved hands and checks the surfaces he can't see with a mirror to ensure their cleanliness. 

Occasionally, a person will ignore the yellow sign that alerts them of his presence. Hirayama dutifully nods and stands outside while they sully his diligence. (As his young, impetuous co-worker Takashi (Tokyo Emoto) is fond of saying, it will only get dirty again.) But he doesn't mind. He waits patiently with a warm smile, gazing up at those canopies and the light that shines through. Then, it's back to work.

Does this man have it figured all out? Has he discovered the meaning of life and is content just to be? Or maybe there’s just something seriously wrong with him.

A Buddha of Bathrooms?

The first half of Wim Wender’s new film, Perfect Days, seems to favor the former take. And for those disillusioned with humanity at large (which, these days, might be humanity at large), Hirayama’s ascetic life plays out a bit like wish fulfillment.

He lives in a modest split-level apartment with a narrow staircase connecting several small rooms. Each day is a gentle repetition of life. He wakes in the morning to the sound of a straw broom brushing the sidewalk below his window. He folds his futon, returns the book he fell asleep reading to its shelf, waters his plants, brushes his teeth, clips his mustache, shaves, and then buys a can of coffee from a vending machine before driving off to work in his van.

At first, he drives in silence, smiling warmly as the rising sun bathes his face. After the new day is sufficiently appreciated, he pops in a cassette from his collection of albums from rock’s golden age: The Animals, The Kinks, Lou Reed, and The Rolling Stones.

He drives from toilet to toilet, thoroughly performing simple tasks and finding satisfaction in a job well done. But he doesn't seem overly fond of Takashi, who shows up late and keeps one eye on YouTube videos as he cleans. Instead of speaking to him, he points. The motor-mouthed Takashi fills the silence with a steady stream of agita, mostly centering on his efforts to woo the out-of-his-league Aya (Aoi Yamada).

In the evening, he glides into a new routine, riding his bike through the city to one of his frequented restaurants where they know his name and order and not to expect much in conversation. He falls asleep reading, drifting into his subconsciousness represented by black-and-white collages of images and sound. The brushing of the sidewalk returns him to waking life.

The film is linear, a progression of days as the title suggests, and for the first half of the film, we might believe they are perfect.

But there's a fly in this idyllic ointment: people. 

A Deeper Connection

Hirayama’s days of cleaning, reading, and listening to classic rock allow him to drift along amid the hustle and bustle of Tokyo without much bother. But throughout the film, people keep drawing him in, and we see him happiest (and testiest) when he's closest to the humans he tries to keep at arm's length. 

Takashi’s youth tries Hirayama’s patience and entwines him into his budding romance with Aya. She discovers Patti Smith in Hirayama’s cassette collection. He watches her listen to “Rodondo Beach” as Takashi tries to connect with her the way Patti Smith’s voice does. Good luck. Soon after, Aya and Takashi are no longer, but Aya returns to thank Hirayama, leaving his Japanese eyes gleaming in a bathhouse later that day. It turns out Hirayama is not a monk. No tree can make a man smile like that.

A more practical object of Hirayama's affection is the owner of a bar he frequents (Yumi Aso), a charming woman who gets him to speak more than three words at once. Seeing the borderline mute Hirayama engage in small talk is an oddly jarring moment. Later, she sings "House of the Rising Sun" for her patrons, a song found in Hirayama's cassette collection. There's a connection between them, but it gets no deeper than one between a customer and patron allows for.

Then there's Niko, Hirayama's teenage niece, who appears on his doorstep two-thirds of the way into the film. He gives up his bedroom to her, turning his comfortable morning routine into one of pantry sleeping and creeping steps to avoid waking her. He's not used to sacrificing his comfort for another person, and it elicits the first hint of angst and, in turn, shortness that we see in him.

But his reward is the time he spends with Niko. She tags along while he works; they listen to “von-mori-son,” have lunch in the park, and ride bikes while philosophizing about living in the moment. It’s another moment of connection that further draws Hirayama from his protective shell.

From Niko, we get hints of the privileged yet traumatic past that led him to his ascetic existence. Isolating himself has been a defense mechanism that's allowed him to find peace with whatever demons haunted him but left him alone in the world. The literal act of letting someone in stirs up emotions that Hirayama was able to keep at bay in his solitary life. 

And after Niko returns home, Hirayama is a different person. He becomes frustrated when Takashi quits without notice, exasperated that he has to do double duty. Later, he catches a glimpse of the bar owner embracing another man, causing him to dash off in a panic and revert to long-discarded bad habits: cigarettes and booze.

Hirayama can handle scrubbing toilets day in and day out. But he still has a ways to go when it comes to relationships, something far messier than public restrooms.

A New Day

Perfect Days is Wender's first film following the pandemic, so it's no surprise that it's about a man learning to escape isolation and connect with people again. It's a moving treatise on the difference between human interaction and human connection and the power to transform that the latter holds. 

The film ends with Hirayama's awakening, sparked by the people he hesitantly let (back) into his life. On his face is all he's lost and everything he can gain.

Wenders infuses the film with a stream of classic rock drawn from Hirayama's cassette collection, but there's a line from a song not in the film, "Buckets of Rain" by Bob Dylan, that feels just as part of his story:

Life is sad, life is a bust, all you can do, is do what you must, you do what you must do, and you do it well. 

This is Hirayama when we meet him. When we leave him, he's ready for more, as Dylan sings in the line that completes the lyric and, perhaps, life itself: 

I'll do it for you, honey baby, can't you tell.