Perfect Days (퍼펙트 데이)
Overview
《Perfect Days》 (original title: Perfect Days) is a 2023 Japanese film directed by Wim Wenders that calmly follows the day-to-day life of Hirayama, a middle-aged man who works as a cleaner of public toilets in Tokyo. It was invited to the Competition section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival in 2023, where lead actor Koji Yakusho won the Best Actor award, and it was selected as Japan's entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 96th Academy Awards. It is regarded as a representative minimalist film that records the delicate texture of repetitive daily life without any spectacular events.
Main Content
Production Background
The film began with "The Tokyo Toilet" project promoted by Shibuya Ward, Tokyo. While planning a short omnibus video centered on public toilets designed by world-renowned architects such as Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, and Toyo Ito, Wim Wenders chose to expand the idea into a feature-length narrative film instead of a short. The screenplay was co-written by Wenders and Takasaki Takamasa, and the approach adopted builds the narrative through extremely sparse dialogue and the details of characters' actions and surrounding objects.
Plot and Characters
The protagonist Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) wakes each day before dawn in the dim light, folds his bedding, shaves, drinks canned coffee, and drives to work in an old van. His day is fixed: cleaning toilets, a sandwich lunch in the park, photographing the shadows of trees with a film camera, the public bath, a used bookstore, his regular yakitori restaurant, and one page of a book before sleep. He listens to old music on cassette tapes, and on weekends he visits the laundromat and the photo lab. This regular rhythm is gradually shaken as he confronts his coworker Takashi's (Tokio Emoto) irresponsible behavior, the appearance of his niece Niko after a long absence, and traces of a family he parted from long ago. The film does not resolve even that disturbance violently; it quietly returns it to the everyday routine that repeats again the next morning.
Music and Imagery
The soundtrack is organized around Hirayama's taste for analog cassettes. Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," from which the title derives, along with 1960s–70s popular music by Patti Smith, The Animals' "The House of the Rising Sun," and Nina Simone flows repeatedly. The very act of choosing and rewinding a tape rather than streaming digitally symbolizes the character's sense of time. Cinematography was handled by Franz Lustig, who intercut black-and-white dream sequences with low-saturation color images, and the motif of capturing the shadows of trees on black-and-white film runs throughout the work.
Themes
The film speaks of a present-centered life, summed up in the line "Next time is next time, now is now." Repetition is presented not as boredom but as ritual rhythm, dissolving the hierarchy between labor and consumption, art and everyday life. Wenders maintains in this work the interest in "the language of things" that he has carried on from works in the lineage of 《Tokyo-Ga》 and 《Perfect Days》, condensing the character's emotions into the actor's face and silence.
Awards and Reception
These were followed by the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award (Koji Yakusho), a nomination for the Japan Academy Prize for Best Picture, and invitations to numerous international film festivals. In critical circles, a strong trend re-evaluates the work not as a narrative of "small but certain happiness" to be consumed, but as a film embodying the dignity of labor and a minimal communal ethic.
Latest Trends
It was released domestically in January 2024, gained word-of-mouth and enjoyed a long run, and phenomena appeared in which audiences made "pilgrimages" to filming locations and public toilets drew renewed attention. Through 2024–2025 it has been continually revisited via major OTT platforms and rereleases and retrospective programs, and the "Hirayama-style routine" has spread as a lifestyle code. The resurgence of analog tastes such as film cameras and cassette players, and the transformation of The Tokyo Toilet project into architectural and tourism content, are also being discussed in connection with this film.
Related Topics
- [[Wim Wenders]]
- [[Koji Yakusho]]
- [[Lou Reed]]
- [[Cannes Film Festival]]
- [[The Tokyo Toilet Project]]