The Delicate Art of Being: An Ode to Wim Wenders' “Perfect Days”
Somewhere between the smog-drenched chaos of Tokyo’s neon veins and the infinite quiet of the city’s public restrooms, Wim Wenders spins a tale so delicate it feels like a whisper in a hurricane. Perfect Days is not a film that hammers its profundity into your skull; it seeps in, like sunlight cutting through a grimy windowpane, illuminating the shadowed corners of your soul where questions about existence and permanence linger like a bad hangover. At its core, this is a film about mindfulness—yes, that overused buzzword repurposed from ancient wisdom—but Wenders gives it back its teeth, making it raw and devastatingly human.
The story is deceptively simple. Hirayama, played with superlative nuance by Kōji Yakusho, is a middle-aged man whose life is as rigid and repetitive as the streaks of sunlight that bounce off Tokyo’s skyscrapers. He cleans public toilets for a living, a job steeped in grime and monotony, and yet he performs it with such precision and quiet pride that it feels almost sacred. His days are a series of rituals: waking at dawn, flipping through cassette tapes in his weathered van, watering a potted plant, and reading books that seem to hold the secrets of the universe between their yellowed pages.
But Wenders doesn’t waste time spoon-feeding you the whys and hows of Hirayama’s life. Instead, he lets you sit in it, uncomfortably at first, like trying to meditate in a noisy room. The plot unfolds not through grand events but through tiny moments that feel seismic in their stillness. A handshake, a shared meal, a fleeting smile—these are the building blocks of Hirayama’s existence, and in their simplicity lies their profundity.
Visually, the film is a study in contrasts. Wenders paints Tokyo as a symphony of light and shadow, where the modern and the ancient collide with poetic violence. There’s an obsession with verticality—skyscrapers towering over the city like monolithic gods, tree trunks stretching skyward as if to escape the chaos below. These vertical lines are a stark reminder of the passage of time, of growth and decay, of permanence and impermanence. They evoke a sense of longing, as if the city itself is reaching for something just out of grasp.
Light and darkness play their own silent roles. Hirayama’s mornings are bathed in soft, diffused light, a stark contrast to the harsh fluorescence of the toilets he cleans. The shadows cast by the city’s architecture are as much a character as Hirayama himself, shifting and evolving as the day progresses, echoing the film’s meditation on transience. Wenders, ever the poet, uses these visuals to remind us that life is not a dichotomy but a spectrum—a dance between light and shadow, presence and absence, being and nothingness.
The silence in Perfect Days isn’t a void; it’s a living, breathing force, thick with tension and revelation. Dialogue here is rationed like cigarettes in a prison cell, parceled out in deliberate, weighted moments. When words do break the surface, they hit like a gut punch—raw, unvarnished truths that linger long after they’ve been spoken. One character, with the weariness of a woman who’s watched the seasons devour themselves, mourns that nothing stays the same, while another ponders, almost wistfully, whether two shadows merging create an even darker one. But Hirayama—the quiet custodian of Tokyo’s soul—rarely speaks. His glances, measured movements, and the deliberate cadence of his days tell stories that language could never articulate. Every pause, every careful step is a window into a world where words would only muddy the waters. His silence isn’t emptiness; it’s the roar of a man who’s learned that the loudest truths are the ones never spoken.
What elevates Perfect Days beyond mere existential noodling is its humanity. Hirayama is a man burdened with a past we only glimpse through fractured moments. A photograph here, a cryptic conversation there. Wenders, in his infinite restraint, refuses to explain, instead trusting the audience to sit with the ambiguity, to feel the weight of Hirayama’s silence.* And it is in this silence that the film’s meditation on mindfulness becomes clear. Hirayama is not running from his past or grasping at an imagined future. He is here, fully and unflinchingly. Each sweep of his mop, each sip of water, is an act of presence, a rebellion against the chaos of the world around him.
And yet, Perfect Days is not a sermon. It does not demand you embrace mindfulness or existentialism or any other -ism. It simply invites you to watch, to feel, to exist in the moment with Hirayama. It’s a film that asks questions rather than providing answers, that lingers in your mind long after the credits roll, like the last note of a favorite song hanging in the air.
In the end, Perfect Days is less a film and more a state of being. It’s a reminder that life is not in the grand gestures or the monumental achievements, but in the quiet rituals, the fleeting moments of connection, and the ever-present dance between light and shadow. Wenders, in his infinite wisdom, has given us not just a film but a meditation, a mirror held up to the infinite beauty and absurdity of existence. And in Hirayama’s quiet, unassuming presence, we find a reflection of ourselves—lost, searching, but, perhaps, just maybe, perfectly here.
*In the film’s Trivia section on IMDB, a commenter has submitted a story that Wenders allegedly shared in an interview, in which he told Yakusho Hirayama’s backstory, to help him channel the spirit of the man he portrays. I’d recommend checking it out after watching the film.