What makes a day perfect for you? Is it a compliment from the boss? Is it getting through another hectic day without a glitch, or is it day capped by a perfect dinner or party?
The 2023 film Perfect Days makes a case for an alternative approach to living, one that downplays the grand materiality of things and elevates joy in the seemingly small moments that make up our time on earth. The movie brings to mind the Japanese word, “komorebi” which literally means “sunlight filtering through the leaves’, though it is more than that.
Komorebi actually speaks of a profound connection to the moment and to nature. It speaks of the necessity to pause, taking time to absorb and appreciate the perfection of insignificant details. Perfect Days bring the komorebi manifesto to life in an achingly beautiful way.
The Story
Hirayama (played by Koji Yakusho) is a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Every day is the same. Every morning he wakes up in his spartan apartment to the grey light of pre-dawn. He puts on his overalls, takes a can of coffee from a street vending machine and sets out in his little van to start work. It’s a solitary life. Days go by without him saying more than a few cursory words. Members of the public hardly notice him, and if they do, it is to view him as an inconvenience.
As you would expect, the film is grindingly slow, and even boring to some. To me, it is one of the loveliest “quiet movie” I’ve ever watched. Wim Wenders, the German director of the film, must be congratulated for making such a crushingly bleak film, the polar opposite of the typical smash-wham-bang type of movies dished out by Hollywood studios. Wenders, however, is no stranger to making art movies. His previous masterpiece, Wings of Desire (1987), an elegiac hymn to a broken cold-war Berlin, garnered much critical acclaims. And Yakusho is an accomplished actor who can convey an extraordinary rich interior life, almost entirely without saying a word.
The film portrays that interior life not with pity, but equanimity and a quiet sense of joy. Hirayama, after all, has time, time to notice tiny moments that make up our existence, like the vagrant who camps in a park and moves in his own dance of self-expression whom Hirayama watches with wonder, or the interplay between the sky and the trees which never fails to light up his face. Trees seems to have a particular significance for Hirayama, something he repays by carefully rescuing fragile maple seedlings to nurture them in his apartment, a modest space with a few of his other favorite things like a cassette recorder and tapes (he listens to 60s and 70s American and British rock), secondhand books bought from budget stores, and a point-and-shoot film camera which he uses to capture the things that please him. That this way of living lightly can bring contentment and joy as conveyed by the film is largely thanks to Yakusho’s remarkable performance.
Perfect Days is a rare thing in cinema today. Where most movies traffic on violence and ego-filled ambitions, it elevates the humble aspects of life into an art. It rejects the thirst for new sensations and novelty that drives so much of society and embraces mindfulness, like komorebi, “sunlight (joy) leaking through the leaves.”