How to Live Your Life

Perfect Days a film by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki.  With Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto.  Streaming on various platforms.  *****

Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo (and that place has some fancy toilets.  Some of them are almost futuristic).  He has a small apartment where he lives in the Japanese fashion, mostly on the floor, moving his futon out of the way in the morning and leaving the space neat and empty.  We see him getting ready every morning, brushing his teeth, clipping his mustache, getting some coffee from a machine in his courtyard (a can of coffee.  A new concept for me).  Every morning as he steps out the front door, he looks in the direction of the sky and smiles.

He drives a superbly equipped and organized van.  When he cleans a bathroom, he does an elaborate and thorough job (in contrast to his young co-worker, who talks on his phone and watches videos while he’s cleaning), picking up trash, cleaning all the fixtures, kneeling to clean out the commodes.  If someone bursts in while he’s working, though he has put a sign outside the door, he steps outside and waits for them to finish, not saying a word, not apparently impatient.  He works at his own pace and doesn’t hurry.  He leaves the place spotless.

On his way to and from work he plays eight-track tapes (there’s a throwback for you) of music from his youth, The Animals, Patti Smith, Otis Redding.  At lunch he goes to a public park to eat a sandwich, and sometimes pauses to take photographs, with an old-time camera, of the trees that surround him.  After work he might go to the baths and spend some time getting clean and relaxing.  He goes to one noodle shop or another for dinner.  In the evening he lies on his futon and reads good literature, Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith.  He has a favorite bookstore, and shelves full of books.

Who is this guy, we ask ourselves.  He’s the most dedicated toilet cleaner we’ve ever seen.  He seems to have more resources than such a man normally would.  (When his young colleague urges him to sell his tapes, which are suddenly coming into vogue and are valuable, he refuses, but gives the guy some money so he can go off and purse the girl of his dreams.  We wouldn’t think a toilet cleaner would have a lot of spare cash.)  He goes to a small bar one night where the bar woman, in a weird coincidence, sings a version of The House of the Rising Sun, which we’d heard from The Animals earlier.  That woman, like all the proprietors he sees on a regular basis, seems to like him, and to look forward to his visits.

What we can’t help noticing is that, though he’s doing a supposedly low-class job, he works as if he’s polishing silver for the emperor.  He cleans up shit and piss as if it’s the greatest honor in the world.  And he enjoys his life, moment by moment.  He has the collection of tapes, the collection of books, and also collates the photographs he has taken, throwing some way and keeping others.  Who is he keeping them for?  Himself, apparently.  There’s no one else around.

Eventually we get some clues about his past.  His fourteen-year-old niece, whom he hasn’t seen for years, comes to stay with him because she’s had an argument with her mother, and eventually that woman—Hirayama’s sister—comes to get her and gives us some hints about how he might have wound up this way.  We also discover, in a surprising and slightly bizarre scene toward the end, that Hirayama does have an emotional attachment, though he expresses it quietly.  Something, it seems, has hurt him emotionally to the extent that he lives this circumscribed life.  But within those limits he enjoys his life and lives it well.  Even on his worst mornings, as he exits his apartment, he looks up at the sky and smiles.

The IMDb website tells us that Tokyo created these high-tech toilets because the city was hosting the 2020 Olympics.  When the games were postponed, they wanted a well-known filmmaker to do a documentary about them.  They got in touch with Wim Wenders, and he said he would do a movie, but wanted to make it a feature film.  Of all the motivations for making what I think of as a major work of art, that is one of the strangest.

On that same website I read a biography of Wenders.  He’s had an up and down career, which reached its height—to my mind—in the sublime Wings of Desire.  He tried to follow it up with a sequel, which bombed both critically and commercially, so his career was on a downward turn.  I would hope Perfect Days would resurrect it.  I’d call it a small masterpiece.

Perfect Days calls to mind for me a scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk was talking about the simple pleasures of existing in a body, blowing on your hands when they’re cold, having a hot cup of coffee.  This movie is an extended riff on that scene.  You give life meaning by living it well.  Hirayama shows us how to do that.