PERFECT DAYS

FOUR STARS To the sound of carefully selected music, Hirayama spends perfect days cleaning toilets in Tokyo.

DRAMA JAPAN Japanese #PERFECTDAYS

Starring Koji Yakusho, Arisa Nakano

Hirayama lives the quiet life. It has a zen-like quality in it’s structure, order, rhythm and routine. He wakes around dawn, attends his bonsai collection, tidies his small home in Tokyo, enjoys the same coffee bought from the same vending machine as he leaves for work. He cleans public toilets and does so with the same, careful attention as might those who care for artworks in the Louvre. His purpose and happiness is centred around a job done well. 

He doesn’t speak a lot, he lets they lyrics of carefully curated songs do that for him. Hirayama has dinner at the same noodle house most evenings and enjoys a weekend lunch at the same restaurant while waiting for his laundry. At night, he dreams of the day that was.

You might argue his life is tedious but for Hirayama it’s a finely nuanced participation in the world around him, where joy and happiness is found in repetition and improvement, where the smallest detail can carry the largest meaning. It’s extraordinarily Japanese.

You might also expect the movie to land a bombshell, that Hirayama’s life is suddenly turned upside down and new purpose is found from new beginnings. You’d be disappointed. Although there are incidents - he swings into the orbit of his young colleague, or the surprise arrival of his niece - it’s they who learn the value of his finely calibrated life. 

As unlikely as it seems, this delicate gem of a story was co-written and directed by German gaijin Wim Wenders (WINGS OF DESIRE), a man who’s also forged a career telling stories with an outsider’s perspective (PARIS, TEXAS). In Koji Yakusho (THE DAYS), he has the perfect insider to bring his story alive with truth and honesty.

This is a film that details everyday minutiae with a deceptive simplicity, and rewards its viewers with an emotional payoff that you barely notice coming. Not that it land with any grandiose gesture - Hirayama would avoid that - but with deceptive, charming, perhaps haunting simplicity.

PERFECT DAYS is the cinematic equivalent of a warm hug.

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