Prune: The profoundly personal minimalism of "Perfect Days"

Tyler Watamanuk on the wondrous toilets and sleek Tokyo Style seen in Wim Wenders’ mild drama. 

Perfect Days was destined to be an aesthete's delight. The original pitch to Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Wim Wenders was to make short documentaries on what were described to him as "little marvels of toilets built by great architects." Those little marvels were part of The Tokyo Toilet project, an urban beautification project that features 17 public restrooms, including designs by award-winning Japanese architects Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma and even streetwear designer turned Kenzo artistic director, NIGO. In the end, Wenders opted for a gentle drama instead of a documentary. The scripted film follows a fictionalized toilet cleaner and his quiet life, and despite spending much of its running time in and around bathrooms, Perfect Days is a visual knockout of a movie.

We see Kengo Kuma's tiny village of a restroom, made up of a maze of angular cedar boards. Shigeru Ban opts for a streamlined silhouette and cleverly uses "locking" exterior glass. (The glass goes from transparent to opaque when the door is locked.) Sou Fujimoto's curving structure looks like a mix between an emptied swimming pool and a Richard Serra sculpture that's been dipped in pure white plaster. However, the two-story apartment of the film's hero, soft-spoken toilet custodian Hirayama, offers a different type of sharp design.

The apartment is in northeast Tokyo. It is modest, but has more than enough space for a single person, even if Hirayama himself lacks a proper bathroom. Wenders has said that Hirayama, played with delicate and soulful precision by Kōji Yakusho, believes in reduction. If possessions reflect personality, then Hirayama is a simple man who loves American music, black-and-white photography, and robust prose. He reads William Faulkner's The Wild Palms and Aya Kōda's Tree; his music choices, including Lou Reed and Patti Smith, known for their poetic lyrics, imply that he is introspective. (Some viewers and critics have noted aesthetic similarities to Moriyama-San, the 2017 documentary about an artsy "urban hermit" who lives in Ryue Nishizawa's seminal Moriyama House.)

The homes in Perfect Days and Moriyama-San evoke the most tasteful parts of Tokyo Style, the cult book released in the 1990s by photographer and editor Kyoichi Tsuzuki. (The book has remained sought after, resulting in Apartamento releasing an official reissue earlier this summer.) There are personal possessions aplenty, but the spaces otherwise carry the neatness of an art gallery. (Many of the homes featured in Tokyo Style are packed with personal stuff and lean slovenly.) Books line the walls, and only the most elemental furniture is shown. Hirayama reads and listens to music while laying on the floor; he stores the prints from his camera in metal boxes organized with an archivist's level of neatness. Even his most eccentric hobby—he grows tiny trees from saplings he collects from public parks—is artfully arranged on a single table. He is more of a curator than a hoarder.

Tsuzuki, the author of Tokyo Style, spent time at esteemed Japanese magazines Popeye and Brutus, both forward-looking youthful publications, before publishing Tokyo Style. "There has been a lot of negative press about how Japanese people live in really small spaces called rabbit homes or whatever, but I found this comfortable to live in," Tsuzuki said in an interview last year. There is no staging in Tokyo Style, offering a come-as-you-are look into the ordinary people in Tokyo. A 1995 review in The New York Times called it a "loving photographic tribute to Japan's middle class."

For a man in his late sixties, Hirayama is what Tsuzuki's former magazine might label a "city boy." The term appeared on the debut issue of Popeye in 1976, and the magazine still explores what it means to be a "city boy" today. The magazine describes it loosely as a style or a way of thinking. On paper, it looks like a plugged-in man with a taste that skews both contemporary and timeless. (Also, both Hirayama and the quintessential city boy favor baggy button-up shirts, slouchy chinos and canvas tote bags.) If you thumb through any issue published within the last year, you'll likely find a twentysomething with a collection of cassette tapes or a tedious arrangement of indoor plants. A snapshot of Hirayama's apartment would feel right at home in Popeye's annual interiors issue.

But aesthetics aside, lurking beneath the surface of the entire film is a unique portrayal of aloneness. Hirayama spends most of his days and nights alone, and his social interaction comes from cooks and clerks at the various spots he frequents: a small noodle shop, a used bookstore, and a public bath house. The film presents a healthy cultivation of loneliness that looks more like deliberate solitude. His tidily appointed apartment is his sanctuary. Hirayama seems content with both. 

The avant-garde structures and toilets remain an anchor throughout the movie. Even all the sharp lines and shiny vitreous china cannot make one forget the shit and piss of life. The work is hard and occasionally dirty, and Hirayama seems to have made peace with this aspect of the job—it is a means to an end, and that end is his quiet life with his rituals and his tiny home with his stuff.

The aforementioned Times review of Tokyo Style continued, "This is no world of peaceful Zen-like tranquility. This is a world of stuff." Looking at the interiors of Hirayama's apartment, he has cracked the code—a place where stuff and tranquility coexist. More so than the books or cassettes, Hirayama's apartment is full of something that cannot be stacked or arranged, but perhaps his most prized possession: bliss.