Perfect Days: Things that happines lies under

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is one of those rare films that doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t chase grand drama, it doesn’t raise its voice, and it doesn’t pretend to offer solutions. It simply sits with you, and if you’re willing to slow down, it changes the way you look at your own life.

The film follows Hirayama, a middle-aged man in Tokyo who cleans public toilets for a living. That description alone sounds almost like a joke, especially when you learn that his brother is wealthy and his family background is comfortable. Hirayama is not cleaning toilets because he has no other option; he chooses this life. And he isn’t ashamed to say it: “I clean toilets.” And In a city obsessed with progress, status, and speed, that choice feels quietly rebellious.

At first glance, Hirayama’s life appears repetitive: same job, same commute, same lunch break, same cassette tapes in his van. But the miracle of Perfect Days is that the repetition never becomes empty. Hirayama notices the smallest variations: the way sunlight hits the leaves, the shape of a shadow, or how one song feels different today than it did yesterday. While most of us are constantly longing for another life, Hirayama is fully awake inside the one he has.

And yet, and this is where the film becomes truly honest, his life is not free of pain.

His family ties are broken. The woman he loves is married. His past is heavy with things he cannot fix. Perfect Days does not present his world as some rosy spiritual fantasy where acceptance magically erases suffering. Hirayama’s life contains real loss. What makes his days “perfect” is not the absence of tragedy, but his refusal to let tragedy dictate how he lives.

His acceptance is not giving up. It is not passive; it is an active, daily decision to meet life where it stands.

Happiness, for Hirayama, is not something he waits for or takes from the world. It is something he creates slowly and deliberately, with attention and care. He doesn’t waste time on what has been taken from him, because he understands that there is no time machine. There is only now.

This is why the film’s portrayal of labor is so important. Hirayama’s work is neither demeaning nor temporary. He performs it with precision and respect, as if the act of cleaning itself is a form of self-communication. In that sense, labor stops being just a way to survive and becomes a relationship with oneself. His toilet becomes, strangely, a place of dignity.

You could even say Hirayama is cleaning up the filth of modern life: not just literal dirt, but the spiritual clutter of a society that measures worth through hierarchy, money, and ambition. His peace has nothing to do with where he stands in that hierarchy; it comes from inner order.

Some viewers complain that the film is “uneventful.” But the point of Perfect Days is precisely that it is uneventful.

Does everything need to be dramatic and action-packed to matter? Sometimes what gives us pleasure is a tree under a temple. Sometimes it’s playing catch in the shade, reading a single page of a book, listening to a song in the car, or playing tic-tac-toe with a stranger.

The film suggests something deeply radical in its simplicity: Maybe life isn’t about grand revolutions. Maybe it isn’t about the expensive things we try to buy. Maybe it isn’t about possessions at all. Maybe it’s about noticing.

Hirayama lives what Nazım Hikmet once described: to take life seriously — not by rejecting joy, but by committing to living without postponing it. Like planting an olive tree at seventy, knowing you won’t live to sit in its shade, yet planting it anyway. Because like Nazım Hikmet said on his poem ‘On Living’: The living side weighs heavier.

And then there is Koji Yakusho. Man… the Japanese really know how to act. This is real acting, not breaking faucets and yelling. Yakusho carries entire histories on his face. He can express thirty emotions at once without speaking a word. That Cannes award was not a prize; it was an acknowledgment.

So what is Wenders really saying?

Happiness lies in simple living.

It doesn’t matter what you do; give yourself to it.

Life is beautiful with people.

Don’t give everyone the same value or the same attention. Find those few people, and be with them.

Perfect Days doesn’t promise you a perfect life. It promises something much more honest: that peace is possible if you’re willing to create it.