In Perfect Days (2023), It’s Okay to Cry

Jeongrak Son ponders on Wim Wenders’ stoic representations of sorrow and the mundane, writing about the Kōji Yakusho-starrer Perfect Days (2023).

“Things happen. Things happen here and there.” This was a quote from Slavoj Žižek that my friend repeated when he was going through a breakup. While I was watching Perfect Days (2023), a new film from Wim Wenders, I kept thinking about this quote. I searched for the source and found a YouTube video with a very fitting title “Slavoj Žižek explains the entire world in three seconds”. Because it is a three-second video, I have no idea what the context of this quote was and what Žižek intended to say there. Yet, I want to believe that this quote is for all the people who want to cry sometimes, and we see them a lot in this film.

In Perfect Days (2023), things indeed happen here and there. The film follows the life of an old toilet cleaner in Tokyo, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho). The first few days in the film resemble typical “Get Ready With Me” or “A Day in the Life” videos. He goes through his morning routines and meticulously cleans toilets to the point that this mundane and unpleasant task appears sacred. The seemingly identical days repeat until the weekend arrives, upon which he has a different set of routines. Until that point, the film is indistinguishable from many comforting films built upon a particular fantasy of quiet Japanese life. Hirayama’s taciturnness somewhat reinforces this stereotype.

However, more events start to unfold. Wenders guides us through the snippets of other lives that Hirayama observes. We see Hirayama’s young colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who has a financial problem, and his girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada). Hirayama’s niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) ran away from her wealthy but overbearing mother (Yumi Asō), Hirayama’s estranged sister. We also see Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa), the owner of a bar that Hirayama frequents, and her ex-husband (Tomokazu Miura), who has little time left to live. There are more brief encounters with characters such as the homeless guy (Min Tanaka) practising some sort of non-standard Tai Chi moves and a boy who waits for Takashi. A common theme: they all contain a deep, individual sorrow.

Sad people have always occupied a central place in Wim Wenders films. Paris, Texas (1984) revolves around a family tragedy; in Wings of Desire (1987), even angels embrace the human emotions of yearning and wistfulness. Perfect Days attempts to go even further. The disheartened characters expose their sadness without really explaining its origin. Some of them we can guess (e.g. Mama’s ex-husband or the toilet boy), but the rest (Hirayama and his sister, the homeless person) are veiled to the audience. This choice of concealment better captures the truth — that there is always an element within our emotions that is inexplicable to others. Hirayama does not try to enquire about or provide solutions to others’ feelings. These characters come in, interact with Hirayama, and exit the story. Hirayama’s days are marginally modified — e.g. he sleeps downstairs for his niece and drives Aya to her workplace — only to be reunited with his “perfect day” routine when his niece returns to her home and Aya never reappears in the film.

The ending of this film, where nothing is resolved, can be perplexing to the audience who anticipated some sense of closure. I would like to borrow Paul Schrader’s theory of transcendental style to interpret the choice Wenders made. Wenders pointed out Ozu Yasujiro as one of the major references for Perfect Days, and Ozu is also one of three main transcendental stylists that Schrader identified in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972/2018). Schrader writes of the Transcendentalist style as “human acts or artefacts which express something of the Transcendent”, “beyond normal sense experience” which is accomplished through “a general representative form” — this form takes place through unassuming, bare camerawork; simplistic, naturalistic acting; and editing that is uncomplicated. To Schrader, Ozu’s transcendental style aims to express the “Wholly Other” that transcends human emotions into a larger form. In addition, he breaks down Ozu’s film into three stages: the everyday, disparity, and stasis. The everyday, which does not need much explanation, can be found in the everyday routines that Hirayama follows. We can also argue that the disparity, described as “an inexplicable outpouring of human feeling” in Schrader’s book, is expressed through intermittent emotive moments in Perfect Days. The first two stages exist to culminate in the last stage: stasis. The definition of the stasis in Schrader’s book is “a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it”, which I believe neatly captures the last scene of Perfect Days.

Returning to Žižek’s quote, we might wonder what we can do when terrible things happen to us. The film suggests that the acceptance might be a solution. A recurrent theme throughout the film is “komorebi”, a Japanese word for a fleeting pattern that leaves, sunlight, and the wind make. Every day, Hirayama takes a picture of komorebi. Each pattern is unique: some of them are good and some of them not so. Nevertheless, knowing that all of them originate from the same sunlight might help us to not be too consumed by the individual patterns.