Perfect Days

On the middle way and attending the details

One of my yoga teachers structured her classes around the seven sages this summer, weaving their stories and postures throughout class, focusing on a different sage each week. The week that I watched Perfect Days, Kaundinya was the focus of class and I was still turning over his story as we settled into our evening viewing.

Kaundinya was a scholar who, when called upon at Siddhartha’s birth, predicted that the prince would renounce the wealth and power he was born to and instead become a great spiritual leader. Siddhartha’s parents tried to prevent this by shielding him from the realities of the world, but he eventually leaves the protection of the palace. For the first time he encounters the elderly, the dying, the dead, and an ascetic monk. Inspired by the monk, he abandons his life of comfort and luxury to live in various ashrams, practicing with the ascetics. Kaundinya follows him. Siddhartha lives this way for years, fasting nearly to the point of death until a young girl offers him a bowl of rice. This prompts another shift and he realizes that while total indulgence isn’t the way to transcend suffering, neither is total abstinence. He then spends a night in meditation and reaches enlightenment. He leaves the ashram (followed again by Kaundinya) and finds the middle way.¹

In class, Kaundinya’s story was framed as an exploration of the way teachers become students become teachers become students, and how rigidity and extremism are rarely sustainable, rarely the path to any meaningful liberation, though they can be illuminating in the short term — possibly even a necessary step on that path — and how the oppositional pull of extremes is one way to find balance.

OK. So I’m not saying Wim Wenders is telling the story of the Buddha with Perfect Days. I’m just saying that’s the story I’d been mulling over when we hit play. I was primed to receive Hirayama — a man who we learn has been exiled (maybe self-exiled) from his wealthy family² and lives a quiet, structured, seemingly contented life working as a public toilet cleaner, filling his down time with art and visits to neighborhood establishments — as a man who’s found the middle way, or is at least on that path.

Scanning reviews for this film, people tend to describe Hirayama as ascetic, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Or at least, that’s not how I understood him. He’s disciplined, yes, but I don’t think he’s depriving himself, not totally. He’s not severe, or rigid, or withholding. We see him take pleasure in the world, sensual and intellectual. We see him reward himself³ after a long day of work. We see him approach the world with care and patience. Hirayama, as I understood him, is not avoiding the physical world in favor of the spiritual one. Quite the opposite. He’s right down in the shit with the rest of us.

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In the days after watching this film, I kept wondering: Why public toilets? Did it have to be public toilets? Turns out there’s a practical answer. Wenders was originally hired to create a docuseries on the Tokyo Toilet Project but when he arrived, a different sort of project elbowed its way in. They agreed to let him make a narrative film instead, provided he could get it done in the same amount of time and with the same budget. Koji Yakusho signed on before there was even a script, with only 3 weeks to prepare.⁴ They shot the film in just 16 days.⁵

But, story wise, I also feel like it did kind of have to be public toilets. What could be more profane than a public toilet — even a state of the art, artistically considered, generally pretty clean public toilet? The toilet is where the distance between the idealized version of ourselves that we project to the world and our animal selves, with our inconvenient bodily demands, comes into sharpest relief (or at least the most frequent site of this). Think of the panic you feel when you’re sitting on the toilet in a public restroom and the handle starts to jiggle. Did I lock the door? Does the lock work? Can they hear me? Oh, god. Don’t let anyone see me like this. It’s hard to feel connected to our higher selves when sitting there helpless and exposed and smelly. We go to great lengths to hide the truth of ourselves in those moments.

So why bother making these toilets places of beauty or (as the British tourist conveys) astonishment and delight? And why does Hirayama bother taking such care to do a thorough job when it will all be immediately undone?

Hirayama doesn’t compartmentalize or dissociate, as I used to when cleaning the post-brunch toilets at the busy Midwestern restaurants where I waited tables. He does the opposite: he pays very close attention. And while he buys his own specialized tools to bring to the job, I don’t necessarily see it as taking pride in his work, either. He seems, to me, detached from that kind of value judgment. It’s almost more like a mindfulness exercise. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching — all without narrative, reaction, or judgment, and therefore without pride. Or shame, for that matter. He’s simply attending the details of his work. Hirayama is free from the sort of judgment we see from his estranged sister. When she asks, Is it true that you clean toilets? we see (as does he) the brief, tragic look she gives in response to his nod.⁶

But, while Hirayama may be without shame when it comes to his work, the life he’s built is not without tradeoff. The tension between who Hirayama is when we meet him and the earlier life the film hints at keeps him at arms length from those around him. He’s of the world but not, of this place but not. He’s an integral part of the community — acquainted with the most intimate, private actions of his community — but he’s also an outsider looking in. He has routines and acquaintances, but no close relationships that we see. Yet he’s deeply attuned to and connected to the rhythms and routines of those around him. His interest in music and literature and photography tells us that not only does he have a rich interior life of his own, but he’s interested in the interiority of others, even if, for whatever reason, he prefers to (or has to?) satisfy that interest through art rather than firsthand experience.

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The other question I’ve been circling since watching this film is whether or not Hirayama is lonely and (separate, but related) whether or not he’s happy with his life.

I do think Hirayama is lonely, yes. I think he’s lonely in the way a lot of us are lonely. Even people who are happy and fulfilled in every measurable sense, surrounded by friends and family, feel the tug of loneliness from time to time. But I also don’t think it’s a loneliness he finds unbearable or that the film wants us to see it as a problem to be solved. If it did, it would’ve been relatively easy to solve it: a romance with the bar/restaurant owner, a deepening friendship with one of the peripheral characters he regularly encounters, reunion with his family.

I was sitting with the question of Hirayama’s loneliness when I came across

jamie hood

’s essay, XII. On Solitude, and this quote (via May Sarton’s journals) from Clark E. Moustakas’ study of Loneliness:

I began to see that loneliness is neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self, a beginning which initiates totally new sensitivities and awarenesses, and which results in bringing a person deeply in touch with his own existence and in touch with others in a fundamental sense.

That’s how I understand him: someone who has a deep and fundamental awareness of himself and those around him. It’s not without pain, but neither is more traditional intimacy.

So, yes, I think there’s a loneliness to Hirayama, but I also think he likes the company he keeps. Both can be true. His life seems, to me, fulfilling in other ways and I don’t think his routine is simply a security blanket or purely a way of protecting himself against the pain of other people. He seems content, with a deep knowledge of himself. He doesn’t seem to yearn for another type of life. But he’s human and it’s only natural to sometimes confront the fact that your life, your self, is not something different — not some other life, some other self — even if you’ve largely made peace with who you are and the decisions you’ve made.

So what to make of that long shot at the end, as Nina Simone’s “Feelin’ Good” plays over his car stereo? There’s a read on this that takes it as a subversion of the contented man we’ve seen throughout the preceding 2 hours, as an indication that his carefully constructed, delicately balanced routine is little more than a now-shattered veneer over deep emotional turmoil. I think that reading is a betrayal of what we’ve seen from Hirayama up until this point. (And as someone who does their best crying in cars, I might add that some of you are denying yourself one of life’s great emotional releases.)

To me it was more that he just had a doozy of a week: his coworker quit without notice and he had to work a double; he had an uncomfortable run in with family⁷; and immediately preceding this scene, he shared a moment of unexpected intimacy with a stranger who’s facing certain death. What else can you do but sit with that mystery and ride the wave of emotions that surface? That’s what he’s done the whole movie — attend the details of the current moment — and it’s what he’s doing here. When you open yourself to that kind of attentiveness, you open yourself to more of everything. Beauty, pain, everything. We’re watching him navigate a more direct confrontation with reality than we’ve seen so far, a reality starker and more profane than dirty public toilets and annoying coworkers and painful family dynamics: death. Wouldn’t it be more disturbing if he was totally unaffected by this?

Now is now is one of the few things Hirayama says in the entire 124-minute runtime.⁸ He’s not doing what most of us do in the face of death: running from it, denying it, doing anything in his power not to think about it. He’s not delaying or deferring, he’s not hiding in the past or pretending that it won’t come for him, too, in due time. As his face cycle through emotions, I didn’t read it as him ginning up a brave face or an attempt to deceive himself and paper over unpleasant feelings. I didn’t see it as an attempt to pull his happy, placid mask back on. He’s sitting in his discomfort, letting waves of intense emotion move through him. It’s a moment of surrender. And, I think it’s worth noting, he’s using art (in this case music) to help tap into and carry himself through that experience of surrender.

Hirayama opens himself to the absurdity, pain, and anguish of existence, and in response — in tandem — he smiles. The other option is despair and that’s not the character we’ve come to know. He smiles at the mystery and that it’s something we even have the opportunity to confront. He smiles in the face of the unnameable and unknowable because even if we can’t name it or know it, we might be able to feel it. Some of the most powerful emotional experiences of my life came only when I gave up trying to understand or control or make sense of what I was feeling and just let myself feel it. That’s what I saw reflected in his face.

We ride this wave with Hirayama before it cuts back to a shot we’ve seen repeated throughout the film: the sun hovering just above the horizon, bathing the city skyline in light. As we leave Hirayama, I don’t find myself worried about him. I don’t find myself thinking this is the beginning of some nervous breakdown or that he’s just had a painful realization about the hollow routine of his life.⁹ Instead I feel a deep gratitude — for this film, for this actor, for this character — for allowing me to feel those feelings without offering any tidy solutions. Because, again, I don’t believe it’s a problem to be solved. This life is a mystery. Awesome, terrifying, and overwhelming. It’ll crack you wide open if you let it (and you should let it, on occasion) and that’s what makes it beautiful. That’s worth paying attention to, pain and all.

1. There are a lot of different versions of Siddhartha’s story. The details change but the broad strokes remain the same.

2. I guess his sister could’ve married rich, so maybe he doesn’t come from money, but that’s the impression we get.

3. Or allow himself to be rewarded, as the barkeep of one of his routine spots exclaims, “For your hard work!” whenever he serves him a drink. (Fact check me on that quote. It might not be exact but that’s the sentiment.)

4. GOAT.

5. When looking around for good conversations about this movie (send me any if you have them!) I came across this MUBI podcast episode where they talk about all this: Perfect Days: Wim Wenders Cures His Post-Pandemic Blues.

6. God, what a MOMENT. A lifetime of complicated sibling dynamics play out in this very brief interaction.

7. It’s worth saying the family confrontation wasn’t all bad. I think he also enjoyed his time with his niece and the fact that they share a kinship beyond blood.

8. It could be a deflection of an uncomfortable conversation with his niece and a hesitancy to make promises he knows he won’t keep, but it’s also a gift to her. Don’t live for tomorrow, live for now, right now.

9. If it’s not clear by now, I don’t believe his life is hollow.