What is a perfect day? What do you have to give up to have them? In the film “Perfect Days” we follow the rather ordinary monotony of one man’s life which is temporarily disrupted by his less dependable and much younger colleague (Tokio Emoto) and then by a relative Niko (Arisa Nakano as Niko) who is looking to escape the pressures of daily life.

 

To fully understand the extent and exacting nature of the “Perfect Days,” you have to understand what the average life in Tokyo for a man working there is. The people I knew got on trains every morning. They might need to board a bus before the train. They might work six days a week. When a special project was due, it might be longer days and even a full seven days for that week or the next.  Sometimes, to avoid the crowded subway trains, they stayed late, even if they didn’t have to work.

To have a car was a luxury and you had to prove you had a parking space for it. Most people in Tokyo, do not own cars. They don’t need to but that means they must rub shoulders with strangers on trains and buses. And you get to know people, regular commuters and become nodding (or bowing) acquaintances.

As for living in Tokyo, that’s a high cost problem. A truly poor person might squeeze two or more people in a one-bedroom apartment with the bedroom serving as a living room once you put the futons away. You might live in a company dorm or apartment complex.

There are other cultural aspects of Japan that are important to understanding this film. In Japanese schools, the students are required to help clean up. That isn’t just cleaning the chalkboard or white board or sweeping the room.

• Why Japanese students serve their own school lunches, clean their classrooms
• Kids get down to classroom clean-ups

That attitude continues into college. When I was in a college dormitory at the International Christian University in Mitaka (Tokyo), we had regular alternating clean up duties (including the bathroom and the toilets) and even a telephone shift. It helped you meet all of the people living in the dormitory and gave you a respect for all of the rooms. So cleaning toilets shared with multiple people isn’t something that a Japanese person wouldn’t have done before while growing up. Besides community building through clean up duties, the dormitory also had a communal traditional bath. You scrubbed and showered, rinsed and then took a long soak in the bathtub with the other dorm members. Of course, this meant each dormitory was single sex.

While in the US, we might look back with nostalgia at the carefree days of middle school or high school, before we had to study hard or work low level part-time jobs, things in Japan are different. Middle school and high school days are often followed by cram schools all focused on preparing one for better opportunities by getting into the best high schools and then testing well to get into the best colleges. From what my friends told me, in a Japanese university, life was more easy-going although they, by going to a Christian university that had classes in English and ran on a more North American concept of college, they had given up that leisurely time to enjoy their youth.

In “Perfect Days, the person we follow along for his perfect days, lives just outside of Tokyo. Hirayama 平山  (Kōji Yakusho 役所 広司) has a two-level apartment and a good parking place for his van. For one person, his apartment isn’t cramped. Yet the apartment doesn’t have a bath tub, forcing Hirayama out into the world of the public bath houses, a sentō (銭湯), one that is frequented by middle-aged and senior men. There’s nothing lurid or luxurious about the place.

At his apartment, Hirayama has neatly arranged books and he’s reading William Faulkner’s 1939 “The Wild Palms” (野生の棕櫚). He regularly visits a bookstore and buys books (Aya Kōda’s (1904-1990) posthumously published 1992 “Tree”). He listens to cassette tapes, mostly American music, including “House of the Rising Sun” which we will hear in both the original English and later,  in a Japanese translation (The Japanese version seems slightly different from the English).  His work ends soon enough that he has time to enjoy lunch in a park, take black-and-white film photographs of the light through the trees and eat at his favorite spots (a small noddle shop and an izakaya (居酒屋)  and go home to read. He isn’t the talkative type.

When he does have to talk, he’s awkward, but sincere. There’s no sense of meanness or bitterness in him. Instead, there’s a sense of sweetness in this introverted man. During his days, he observes a homeless man (Min Tanaka) who seems like a figure out of the past with his bundle of sticks.

When he is forced to speak with his younger sister (Yumi Asō), we understand that he comes from a wealthy family, but has turned away from the difficult relationship he had with his father and  the responsibilities of being the eldest child and perhaps only son. There is a warning that comes with marrying an only son in Japan and even marrying the eldest son is faced with trepidation over the responsibilities associated with the eldest son. Within my own extended family, I know of two eldest sons who have disassociated themselves with their siblings. One was believed to be dead even though he was living well past the date of the second brother’s death. There might not be comparable expectations to what we see in the average family in the US. To be without familial responsibilities and the confrontations entailed might be a relief to any and all of us. And that would be particularly true for someone as introverted as Hirayama.

What I think “Perfect Days” illustrates is a man living the life once associated with the gentleman scholar or even, with his penchant for older music hits on cassette tapes, a man continuing to live the easy life of a Japanese college student. Is he someone stuck in a rut or someone who wants to enjoy his version of perfect days? I think he is the latter.

The film ends, after the credits, with text that notes a Japanese term for the ephemeral light between the trees: komorebi （木漏れ日). The first character means “tree” (木). The second and third symbols mean “to leak through” (漏れ). It has both the symbol for “water” (sansei 三水) and the symbol for “rain” (雨). The last symbol means “day” or “sun” (日). The definition used for the film, emphasizes that this is specific and unique to a moment. The writers resisted making the main character’s name associated with trees which would have been easily done. Instead Hirayama means “peaceful mountain.”

Although this is a film by German director Wim Wender (“Pina” 2011)–co-written with Takuma Takasaki (“Honokaa bōi,” 2009), it feels essentially Japanese. It made me contemplate: What is a perfect day? Have I had a perfect day? I think I have and it had nothing to do with work or time spent caught in rush hour traffic.  And while I’m not as entranced by komorebi, there are days when clouds catch my fancy and I photograph them–before social media, I didn’t even share them with anyone. But obsession is one mark of an artistic nature, and obsession with natural phenomena, the everyday beauty that others might miss during the hustle-bustle of daily life,  isn’t such a bad thing.  Here in the US we might remind ourselves and others to “Don’t forget to smell the roses.” Hirayama is a man who performs a useful and necessary task within society and takes pride in his work. Moreover, he has time to enjoy life and he harms no one. 

“Perfect Days” touched me in a way as personal and deep as “Pina.”

US audiences might be familiar with Yakusho from the 1996 “Shall We Dance?” or the 1985 “Tampopo.” Fans of samurai films might recognize him from Takashi Miike’s 2010 “13 Assassins” or the 2011 “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai.”  Here in “Perfect Days, ” he is subdued, but always watchable.

 

 

“Perfect Days” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of this year and was nominated for a Palme d’Or, but the Japanese-German production won Best Actor for Kōji Yakusho and Wim Wnders won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. On 3 November 2023, it won Best Film as the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The film was shot in just 17 days in Tokyo. In Japanese with English subtitles.