'Perfect Days': Tokyo Nice

A gentle movie about (among other things) cleaning toilets will have you re-examining your whole goddamn life

What, to you, defines a perfect day? Is it lounging somewhere relaxing with your lover person, completely removed from the outside world? Is it notching some long-aspired to accomplishment, proving to your high school guidance counselor that you are, in fact, a winner? Does it involve the best meal ever? The best sex ever? The best [TK] ever?

Or maybe it’s just getting up, doing your job, taking some photos, grabbing a beer, and reading a few pages of some old Faulkner book before hitting the hay. And then, woken up the next day by the clockwork sound of your neighbor’s sweeping , doing it all over again?

WELL, if you’ve ever read an intro paragraph before then you know the movie we’re about to discuss, aptly named ‘Perfect Days’, very much embodies the latter!

Co-written (alongside Takuma Takasaki) and directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders (‘Paris, Texas’, ‘Wings of Desire’), ‘Days’ chronicles — and that might already be too strong a verb — the daily routine of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a middle aged Tokyo resident who lives by himself, does janitorial work, and seems largely content with an existence I think most of us would, on the surface, not necessarily aspire to.

Now, before you say “how dare you, Hendog, taking potshots at blue collar work,” know that:

1. My primary form of income right now — outside my ‘Stack — is Lyft driving, a genuine gig economy gig that marries the thrills of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ to real vehicular danger and

2. There has never been a kindergartner in human history, I don’t care how progressive the Silver Lake elementary school, who has dreamed of cleaning toilets when they grow up

All I’m saying is, you know, we live in a world that undervalues those not actively scrambling for golden rings. We’re speaking the same language here! I don’t know who I’m arguing with¹. Anyway, if ‘Days’ truly were just a janitor sim, I’d have already filed this review to Letterboxd with three point five stars and the caption “more like perfect toilets.”² Luckily for your inboxes, toilets only tell half the story.

Genuinely beautiful toilets!

File ‘Days’ under “movies that teach you how to watch them.” I’ve undoubtedly weaponized this expression in prior reviews, meant to justify everything from ‘The Tree of Life’ to, like, ‘Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist’ — you’re not BORED, man, you’re just learning how to absorb a movie’s particular energies. But I think there’s a lot of merit to the idea here, not just because the pace of this thing is so un-American³ (blame my domestic ignorance) but because the very life it follows — and the decisions that animate that life — buck so much prevailing social wisdom as to seem almost alien.

The first ten, maybe fifteen minutes of ‘Days’ are literally just Hirayama’s weekday routine. He…

wakes up, folds his bed, brushes his teeth, trims his mustache, water his plants, puts on his uniform, grabs his keys and some change from the foyer, smells the morning air, grabs some canned coffee from a nearby vending machine, drinks it, starts his car, loads a cassette

drives into Shibuya, cleans some toilets, enjoys his lunch break in the park, take some photos of trees, cleans up at a local spa, grabs some food at a nearby restaurant, stops in to a nearby bar afterwards, goes home, checks on his plants, reads for a bit, then puts his head down to, well, do every single one of those things again the next day.

The fact that I can list all this out even a week month after seeing the movie and what I’m describing is, let’s be real, objectively boring actually speaks to the spell this movie casts. We’re conditioned as American audiences to always be… scanning for plot, actively looking out for stuff like “inciting incidents” and “refusals of the call” whether we’ve had the pleasure of reading Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’ or not. And I assumed as much about ‘Days’, for a while, waiting for the moment that propelled it in a more conventional (read: more Hollywood) narrative direction. You know, “let’s watch some new stimuli upend this guy’s sad, lonely life for the better.” A new stimuli does arrive, eventually, does temporarily upend things… but when it doesn’t change Hirayama, at least not in the ways we expect, that’s when you think, well shit — was I the asshole for wanting the janitor to re-align himself with the virtues of neoliberal capitalism??

I’m talking around the movie, I know — this is just my style — but only to preserve for you the experience of soaking it up yourself, whether in theaters or at home in mid-July, when it enters the physical Criterion Collection. ‘Days’ is largely un-spoilable!⁴ What resonates aren’t plot points but the slow reconceptualization of the title. Perfect days? How could a dude who lives like a better-adjusted Unabomber be having perfect days? Something’s wrong here, maybe he’s even hiding out from something — no one could possibly want ONE of his days, let alone a lifetime of them. And yet that life’s obvious beauty becomes more and more apparent as ‘Days’ wears on and, having been taught to watch, you start to think damn… maybe dude knows something we don’t. Maybe there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s after all.

Like I wrote above, I find myself in a bit of a rough occupational patch at the moment. It’s been three years, a whole presidency, since I last worked in television and in that time, I’ve watched the industry I (think I) love careen into what can only be described as “system failure.” Writer friends of mine who are working know how rare those jobs are; the rest of us contemplate what it might take to land them once again, if OpenAI doesn’t beat us to the punch. It’s bleak! Read enough Hollywood Reporter essays about it and you, too, might start to identify with the Unabomber.

All of which is to say, ‘Days’ really spoke to me at a moment where I find myself unmoored from more traditional measures of success, of livelihood, and struggling to find moments of calm (let alone beauty) as I traverse the entirety of LA County as a Lyft driver. I don’t have Hirayama’s uniform, but I do have his music collection. We both keep playing this one:

“Sometimes I feel so happy,

sometimes I feel so sad,

sometimes I feel so happy,

but mostly you just make me mad.

Baby, you just make me mad.”

I can’t hear those notes or those lyrics — truly some of the simplest lyrics ever committed to paper, outside of “baby shark do do do do do do” — and not start to cry at least a little, for reasons I only sort of understand (or anyway want to think about). It’s the simplest stuff that’s usually the truest. Sometimes you’re happy; sometimes you’re sad; other times, get this, you’re mad. It’s the eternal emotional roundabout of life, as common for a billionaire or a sometimes TV writer or a janitor, all of us just trying to navigate each day as it comes, with a modicum of gratitude and awareness.

…Good movie!

1. God

2. Which I might still do

3. a German and Japanese co-production; what, are we starting WWII over here?

4. The best movies, I’d argue, are largely un-spoilable, but that’s a ‘Stack for another day…