Not all movie heroes wear capes, it is said, but only the rare, cherished few don rubber gloves and blue overalls. Perfect Days, the gorgeous new drama from the German director Wim Wenders, is about one such man of action: a lone wolf in crowded modern-day Japan. Middle-aged Hirayama is employed by Tokyo Toilet and drives a small van from one public convenience to the next. Like Travis Bickle and Dirty Harry, he’s on a mission to clean up the city. Unlike them, Hirayama means literally: he comes with brushes, squeegees and detergent.
Hirayama is played by Kōji Yakusho, a 68-year-old mainstay of Japanese cinema with approximately 100 screen credits to his name. He was the mysterious diner in the 1980s hit Tampopo, the anguished father in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, and a penitent killer in the Palme d’Or-winning drama The Eel. But he has never been involved in such a curious project as this one, nor seen a film spark and explode to quite this degree. He won the best actor award at last year’s Cannes film festival, and Perfect Days now stands a chance of lifting the best international film Oscar. Yakusho – in his serene, rueful fashion – is still making sense of it all.
“Very strange journey. Unusual,” he says, not least because Perfect Days wasn’t even supposed to be a feature film at all. It was originally commissioned as a short documentary to celebrate the Tokyo Toilet art project, a set of 17 architect-designed public bathrooms that were installed in the city’s Shibuya district. It should have been small, then it became a big production. Yakusho arrived late; he was very nearly caught short. “I’d never been to public toilets before,” he says, and then quickly clarifies. “I mean, I’d never been to these public toilets before – I wasn’t aware of the Tokyo Toilet art project. So it all felt intriguing and worthwhile to me.”
Hirayama’s life is one of strictly ordered routine, so ritualised and repetitious that it verges on the monastic. He rises early and folds up his bedroll. He trims his moustache and sprays his houseplants. Then he sets forth on his rounds, slotting beloved cassettes (Nina Simone, Van Morrison) into the antique tape-deck of his van, a soulful old hangover from a simpler analogue age. Hirayama’s work is a grind. He appears to have no close friends or family. Despite all this, however, he feels he is in the right life.
Perfect Days is a drama but was shot like a doc, swiftly and loosely over a 16-day period, with Wenders directing via a translator, if at all. Yakusho smiles at the memory. “Quite early on, [Wenders] said to me, ‘Can I just shoot everything? Rehearsals, everything.’ So it got to the point where he was simply following Hirayama’s day – at home and at work – and I was just living the man’s life as it went along. That was strange, but it seemed to work smoothly.” At the end of the shoot, the managers at Tokyo Toilet even offered Yakusho a permanent position cleaning loos. He suspects they were joking, but then again, maybe not.
No man is an island, not even Hirayama, who has to contend with a feckless co-worker and a runaway niece and who eats dinner most evenings inside a bustling covered market. His real co-stars, however, may be the public toilets themselves, which range from a brutalist space-pod to a coloured glasshouse whose walls turns opaque when it’s locked. From a distance, these buildings could pass for immaculate art installations. Inside they are almost surgically clean. Wenders’ film makes Tokyo look so harmonious and hygienic. If Perfect Days were set in London, it would be a full-blown horror movie.
Yakusho nods. Regrettably, he has some experience of western loos. “Probably in Japan it is different,” he says. “To make clean your toilet – to have a certain standard of hygiene – is something we’ve been told to do since we were children. And if we do that, we’re told, then something wonderful will happen.”
He gives the matter further thought. “Maybe it’s part of our culture,” he adds. “But there is also this idea that God resides in everything. And if God lives in everything, that of course includes a toilet. That’s what we’re told and it is a good way to think. If you go to the toilet, God lives there. And if you believe that, then you respect his presence. That way you’re considerate of the next person who will be using the toilet.”
The actor’s own background is more white-collar than blue. His birth name is Hashimoto; Yakusho is a stage name. It loosely translates as “government office” and nods back to his time as a junior civil servant, just before he caught the acting bug. “I come from Nagasaki,” he explains. “And growing up in those rural areas, smalltown areas, everyone dreams of living in the big city, Tokyo. So that was the initial motivation. I worked as a civil servant for about four years and I would probably have gone home in the end, if I hadn’t encountered this thing called acting and decided to pursue it, which I am still doing now.”
As far as international audiences are concerned, Yakusho’s breakthrough film was the 1996 romcom Shall We Dance. He played Shohei Sugiyama, a depressed Tokyo accountant who gets bounced out of his rut after joining a ballroom dancing class. I’m assuming this was a role he could relate to – the becalmed office drone galvanised by the performing arts – but he insists the parallels with his own life were superficial at best.
“First of all, I wasn’t wearing a suit,” he says. “I didn’t even have to come into the office every day – although yes, I do remember the crowded commuter trains. I was a very young civil servant, so I wasn’t jaded or bored. My life at that time was mainly about drinking, fun, and being out in Tokyo.”
If Perfect Days contains anything so crass and clanging as a message, it’s that a life of service has meaning and low-wage work is of value. As Hirayama beetles around the public parks, Wenders takes time to drink in the city’s atmosphere, thrilling to the background thrum of the morning traffic and the dancing fall of sunlight through the trees. The cleaner, of course, is part of this quotidian ebb and flow. But the film implies that he may be something more besides. He’s the secular saint in our midst, or a kind of invisible seamstress holding society’s fabric together.
“He’s a happy man,” says Yakusho, but I wonder if this is true. While Perfect Days provides little in the way of backstory, it becomes clear Hirayama isn’t entirely at peace with himself. The man is in flight from his past; he’s periodically troubled by old ghosts. Most critics have read this as a poignant film about joy. Alternatively, one can view it from the other end of the telescope: as a joyous film about sadness and solitude, rejection and despair.
“Yes, of course,” says Yakusho. “Any interpretation is fair. But I still think he’s fulfilled by the life that he has. Obviously he doesn’t have very much, he doesn’t own many things. But he lives in each moment. He feels content in each moment. So I would say that, objectively, it’s a happy life that he’s leading.”
Is it a life that Yakusho envies? On balance it is. “In Japan we have a saying. We say that fulfilment is to be satisfied with the situation you’re put in and to feel grateful for every second you have. If you can manage that, you’re fulfilled. You have a rich, full life. So yes, I’d like to live like that, like Hirayama, but I know it’s not easy. Cleaning toilets.” Yakusho smiles. “Now that would be a challenge.”
• Perfect Days is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 23 February and Australian cinemas on 28 March.
