CLEAN LIVING

PERFECT DAYS Wim Wenders finds serenity in life’s simple pleasures.

Arisa Nakano and Kôji Yakusho enjoy some of Japan’s public spaces in Perfect Days

These days, from books to CDs to streaming channels, we’re all overloaded with content. ‘If you have Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney, you cannot even live [long enough] in order to see it all, let alone see one of them properly,’ sighs Wim Wenders. ‘There’s too much!’ No wonder the German director of Paris, Texas was drawn to creating the character of Hirayama for his new award-winning film Perfect Days.

A diligent Tokyo toilet cleaner, Hirayama finds harmony in his monastic existence, snapping photographs of trees and listening to Lou Reed on cassette. ‘Hirayama is a certain utopia of a man,’ explains Wenders, who admires the character’s pared-down life.

‘Hirayama was the man I have inside me who has enough of everything and he doesn’t need more. He never has the feeling he misses anything.’

Played by Kôji Yakusho, Hirayama certainly chimed with the Cannes Film Festival jury last year, who awarded the Japanese star Best Actor. With Perfect Days also now Japan’s official entry for this year’s Best International Feature category at the Oscars, it’s remarkable

‘Hirayama was the man Ihave inside me who has enough of everything and doesn’t need more’

WIM WENDERS

when you consider it all began life in the pandemic, when Wenders was invited to Japan to make a short piece about the Tokyo Toilet project, a scheme in the Shibuya district that saw 17 architects redesign public conveniences.

The director insisted on a feature instead, ‘a film about Tokyo at that moment’, inspired in part by Japan’s response to the lifting of pandemic restrictions. ‘The way that the people of Tokyo came back into social life was so utopian,’ says Wenders, noting it was very different in his home of Berlin where public spaces were ‘destroyed’. ‘The common good was a victim of the pandemic. And in Japan, it was the opposite: the common good was a way to celebrate this social glue.’