The Brooklyn Rail

I thought I glimpsed elements of a resurgent neorealism in Perfect Days (2023), Wim Wenders’s latest feature, when I first saw it this summer. Wenders’s film, which stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a professional toilet cleaner in Tokyo’s downtown Shibuya district, offers a tender glimpse of a working class life—one we might otherwise never dwell on or dismiss as mere misery. The job is indeed lowly, and one might expect a view into the underbelly of one of the world’s busiest commercial centers to be edgy or stomach-turning. But Wenders’s film is serene, revealing and slowly savoring a life alert to its surroundings and content with its place within the wider world. By the time credits rolled, I left feeling jealous of Hirayama’s modest comforts.

In Perfect Days, Hirayama lives alone in an outer district of Tokyo, sleeps on a tatami mat in a small room—empty except for a reading lamp, a bookshelf and a stack of cassettes—and wakes with the sun. Grabbing a canned coffee, he drives his van to work while the streets are still empty and fastidiously cleans several latrines before lunchtime—which he spends in a park, gazing contentedly at trees. Hirayama takes pictures of light-soaked branches with a small point-and-shoot camera, and he has a whole room full of potted saplings at home. Even his dreams, rendered each night in beautifully textured grisaille, seem to encompass nothing more than leaves and branches in sunlight. Rarely speaking yet conspicuously self-assured, Yakusho’s character seems to aspire to the simplicity and sturdiness of a silver maple.

In its unabashed desire to center the life of a person whose status typically renders them invisible, Perfect Days appears to offer a lesson in class consciousness not seen since the days of De Sica. Italian neorealism, which flourished after the collapse of Mussolini’s government, was a sensitive response to the destruction and immiseration the country was then facing. Though it was certainly born out of a fidelity to national interests, it helped revive a more positive, sympathetic sense of Italian identity in the wake of fascism. Today, Japan (like the United States) might boast the luxuriant trappings of a well-oiled economic machine, but it’s a machine that requires a large portion of the populace to submit themselves as cogs for the benefit of a plutocratic few. A cinema that could return our collective solidarity toward the marginal and vulnerable feels long overdue.

But although Hirayama’s daily rituals are granted a similar reverence to neorealism’s heady early days, a sense of struggle is missing. Menial labor is grinding, even when well-organized and well-compensated. To dedicate much of one’s life to the thankless service of others can be frustrating and humiliating, and such invisible labor rarely inspires one to do one’s best. In spite of all this, cleaning toilets seems almost placidly joyful for Hirayama, who has jury-rigged several tools to get at obscure corners and crannies of his glistening domain. And though his cleaning practice offers a chance to show us his pride and work ethic, it’s never actually difficult, because the toilets are never actually dirty. When he gets off the clock, he makes daily visits to his local bathhouse, dines out nightly, and even has time to keep up with modern literary trends—the shopkeeper commends him on his choices when he swings by the bookstore. In short, this vanishingly rare cinematic treatment of the underclass seems instead like something of a red herring. Though you would think no work is lower, Hirayama’s lifestyle seems delightfully comfortable—even in the socioeconomic sense of the word.

The toilets themselves are similarly exceptional. No mere latrines, Hirayama’s domain is strictly limited to The Tokyo Toilets, a public-private initiative launched in 2020 by Koji Yanai, the executive behind the holding company that runs UNIQLO. Something of a bespoke public works operation for Shibuya, the 17 toilets currently constructed by the initiative feature designs by some of Japan’s most important architects, including Toyo Ito and Tadao Ando. The result is an extremely skewed and idealized portrayal of life in facilities maintenance, and it’s reflective of trends in wealth disparity and architectural apologia similar to Thomas Heatherwick’s Little Island or the Hudson Yards Vessel. The toilets Hirayama cleans are a rich person’s best guess at what the poor people they putatively “share” the same urban space with might want or need. According to Wenders’s movie, this all works out swimmingly.

Irony of ironies, Perfect Days was originally financed by The Nippon Foundation, the philanthropic manager of The Tokyo Toilets, who “invited” the beloved German director to make the film for them. Though they promised Wenders total creative control, the initial invitation was to devise a character who would embody Japan’s unique “welcoming culture” in relation to a newly iconic boutique public restroom project. Nippon, an ardently nationalistic enterprise (its founder, Ryoichi Sasakawa, was a great fan of Mussolini’s) has gotten in trouble several times in the past for promoting eugenics and whitewashing war crimes, and appears to operate with a vested interest in furthering international perceptions of Japanese superiority. Perhaps that’s why the toilets Hirayama cleans never seem dirty in the first place.

By celebrating such a simple and unmaterialistic life, Perfect Days appears at first as a joke on its image-conscious corporate funders. But the joke may in fact be on the viewer, who in falling for such a rhapsodic depiction of unenviable work is forced to ignore how curated and idealistic that life actually is. Like The Tokyo Toilet project itself, the film seems to be a wealthy person’s idea of what poverty looks like. The fact that this depiction is so generous, in both spirit and execution, could be read as either an aspirational call for a more abundant public commons or as a hollow attempt to paper over the daily injustices that exist there. In its glowing fictionalization of a real-life public works project, supported by plutocrats appearing to operate for the benefit of the neediest, Perfect Days creates a deeply ambiguous serenity. Like the neorealist movies of old, its earnest compassion for the everyman contains traces of a darker nationalist project.