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| an image of quiet contentment and humble grace. |
There are films that move through plot, and there are films that move through air.
Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) belongs to the second kind — a work where almost nothing happens, yet something invisible keeps unfolding, like breath in a sleeping body.
Its protagonist, Hirayama, lives in Tokyo and works as a public toilet cleaner.
Every morning, he wakes at the same hour, folds his bedding, waters his plants, listens to old cassettes, and drives his van to work.
He cleans, eats lunch under the trees, photographs the play of light and shadow, returns home, reads, sleeps, and repeats.
That’s the entire story — at least on the surface.
The rhythm of his days carries the stillness of a monk’s liturgy.
Wenders films him with reverence, letting each gesture — the tightening of a glove, the wiping of a mirror, the slow exhale of cigarette smoke — reveal its quiet perfection.
Hirayama’s life has become a ritual of attention: everything unnecessary has burned away, leaving only small acts done with grace.
And yet beneath this surface calm, something trembles.
When his young niece unexpectedly appears, we glimpse that Hirayama once belonged to a very different world.
Through her, and later through the visit of his sister, fragments of a past life surface — a father with power and pride, a family bound by status, a man who once must have had everything and then walked away.
Wenders later confirmed it: Hirayama had been a wealthy businessman and an alcoholic, on the verge of suicide, when a flash of sunlight through leaves saved him.
He left everything behind, first to become a gardener, then a toilet cleaner.
What looks like simplicity is actually the afterlife of collapse.
Perfect Days is, in that sense, a story of resurrection that refuses to call itself that.
It’s about what remains when redemption has no audience — the dignity of an ordinary day lived after the ego’s death.
Where other films ask “What makes life meaningful?”, this one answers with silence, sunlight, and the sound of a broom on stone.
The Misunderstanding of Happiness
One widely shared reaction to Perfect Days goes something like this:
“The main character doesn’t seem happy.
Yes, he smiles and loves nature, but real people need relationships, excitement, and joy—not this strange loneliness.”
At first it’s almost funny—the way the viewer misses what is right in front of them—but beneath the humor lies a quiet tragedy.
Most of us have been trained to recognize happiness only when it wears certain costumes: noise, romance, victory, applause.
If someone is still, we call it emptiness; if they are self-contained, we suspect repression.
We have forgotten that peace itself has no spectacle, that there exists a joy too subtle for the screen.
To an unquiet mind, Hirayama’s calm looks like absence.
When he weeps, it must mean despair; when he looks at a young woman in the park, it must mean desire; when he feels relief that a reliable coworker arrives, it must mean attraction.
Every gesture is interpreted through the grammar of craving—because craving is the only grammar we know.
The modern psyche cannot imagine contentment that consumes nothing.
But Perfect Days proposes another logic.
What if the end of striving is not vacancy but clarity?
What if peace is not the opposite of life but its transparent form?
What if meaning begins only when the search for happiness ends?
Hirayama’s serenity is not numbness; it is what remains when resistance to reality is gone.
It is the hush after the orchestra stops, when one finally hears the music that was always underneath.
He no longer performs wholeness for anyone.
He simply lives, and in living, becomes the teaching.
To the ordinary gaze, that looks like melancholy.
But to anyone who has survived collapse or burnout, his smile is instantly recognizable:
the quiet smile of someone who has stopped negotiating with existence—not out of defeat, but out of understanding.
The Backstory of Collapse
Wenders later disclosed what the film itself only hints at:
Hirayama was once a rich, alcoholic businessman who woke one morning in a hotel room, surrounded by the ruins of success, and prepared to die.
Then he saw sunlight passing through the leaves outside the window.
That single moment — the quiet radiance of ordinary light — interrupted the machinery of despair.
He walked away from everything, first becoming a gardener, then a cleaner of public toilets.
From empire to service.
From control to care.
This unspoken history transforms the whole film.
It tells us that Perfect Days begins after the apocalypse.
What we watch is not decline but the life that starts after ambition dies.
Hirayama has already faced the void that most people spend their lives avoiding.
Now he tends to the world as one tends to an altar that has survived fire.
Collapse here is not punishment.
It is initiation by exhaustion — the sacred failure through which false meanings are burned away.
Some reach this point through meditation; others, like Hirayama, arrive through ruin.
The difference is only in the doorway.
Once inside, both discover the same territory: a reality stripped of justification, where things are simply themselves.
That is why his routine feels liturgical rather than mechanical.
Every act — tightening a glove, wiping a mirror, watering a plant — is the humble continuation of a vow made in that hotel room: never again to live asleep.
The business suit became overalls; the boardroom became a toilet stall.
But the essence is the same: precision, dignity, attention.
The difference is that now it serves life instead of ego.
The Paradox of Conscription and Choice
Not everyone enters simplicity by choice.
Some walk into it with the calm of renunciates; others are dragged, shouting, through the wreckage of their own lives.
But the difference fades once the noise subsides.
In the end, both stand in the same clearing — emptied, watching the same light pass through leaves.
We like to imagine enlightenment as a voluntary pilgrimage, a noble decision of the will.
Yet most awakenings begin as defeats.
Illness, betrayal, humiliation, loss — these are the Goddess’s rough invitations.
When the mind no longer knows how to win, it finally stops interfering with what is.
The collapse that felt like punishment becomes the doorway to transparency.
In Tantric language, this is the difference between the yogi who offers himself to the fire and the one whom the fire finds.
The first burns consciously, the second helplessly — but both become ash.
Grace doesn’t discriminate between volunteers and conscripts; it only asks for surrender.
That’s why Hirayama’s peace feels so authentic.
It wasn’t designed.
It was salvaged from the ruins of control.
He didn’t renounce ambition to feel pure; he simply accepted the life that remained when ambition imploded.
And in that acceptance, a strange luminosity began to grow — the quiet radiance that follows total defeat.
The Dhumāvatī Realm: Living After the Fire
After the fire, nothing spectacular remains.
Only routines — but the routines have changed substance.
They are no longer duties performed for something; they are gestures in which being itself breathes.
Hirayama’s life moves within this field.
He wakes before dawn, folds his bedding with the precision of a priest arranging offerings, waters the plants on his windowsill as if tending to small deities of renewal.
He drives his van through Tokyo’s arteries and cleans toilets that gleam like votive shrines.
Nothing in his day promises progress, yet everything carries presence.
In the Tantric vision, this is the province of Dhumāvatī — the smoky goddess who governs the aftermath, the moment when desire has burnt down but awareness remains luminous.
Her devotees do not flee the world; they serve it without attachment.
To live in her realm is to practice purification without pride: polishing mirrors, sweeping floors, returning things to order not because they are unclean, but because clarity loves to express itself through form.
This is why Hirayama’s gestures feel sacred even without religion.
He doesn’t chase transcendence; he maintains transparency.
Each act becomes a mantra of restoration: life returning to simplicity after being distorted by ambition.
His discipline is not repression; it is tenderness organized into form.
Wenders films these moments as icons of ordinary divinity — water running over metal, sunlight through leaves, the rhythm of a brush.
The camera never intrudes, because Hirayama himself no longer intrudes.
He has become a witness performing necessity.
Where others see labor, he experiences a continuous sacrament: the world quietly cleaning itself through his hands.
And yet, this is not perfection.
He still tires, still sighs, still stumbles home after double shifts.
But even fatigue has turned transparent; it no longer demands meaning.
It is simply part of the weather of being.
That acceptance — nothing excluded, nothing glorified — is the hallmark of Dhumāvatī’s grace.
In her realm, holiness hides inside the mundane.
Devotion is measured not by ecstasy but by endurance, not by visions but by the steady willingness to polish the mirror again tomorrow.
When ambition and shame are gone, what remains is service that expects nothing.
Hirayama’s life is that service.
It is how the divine continues after the story ends.
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| Aya, a love interest of coworker Takashi, enjoys a Patti Smith song on one of Hirayama’s cassette tapes. |
Aya and Takashi — How the World Meets Stillness
The middle section of Perfect Days introduces two younger characters who briefly disturb Hirayama’s sealed rhythm: Takashi, his unreliable coworker, and Aya, the woman Takashi is trying to impress.
Their short presence in the film is not filler; it reveals how different forms of energy react to a man who no longer plays social games.
1. Takashi — the restlessness of the unformed self
Takashi is loud, perpetually late, and forever distracted by his phone or fantasies of success.
He cleans only to finish, not to serve.
Where Hirayama’s gestures are slow and deliberate, Takashi’s are careless; his body vibrates with the anxiety of someone still performing life instead of inhabiting it.
When he convinces Hirayama to lend him the van so he can impress Aya, he even steals a Patti Smith cassette from the older man’s collection.
It’s a small act, but symbolically perfect: the immature ego steals what it cannot yet understand.
The cassette, for Hirayama, is memory and meaning; for Takashi, it is currency.
In this theft, we glimpse two worlds colliding — one that measures life by use, and one that measures it by reverence.
2. Aya — curiosity without cynicism
Aya, unlike Takashi, is not trying to exploit Hirayama.
Her first motive is superficial — attraction to Takashi — but once she meets Hirayama, her tone changes.
She senses his quiet dignity, his lack of manipulation.
While Takashi flees from stillness, Aya is momentarily drawn to it.
Her decision to return the stolen cassette herself is crucial: it restores moral balance and introduces a very different form of youth — one capable of sincerity.
When she sits with him in the van, asks to play the tape once more, and gently kisses him on the cheek, the moment is not romantic.
It’s an unspoken recognition: a young person acknowledging someone who has found what the world keeps promising and never delivers — inner steadiness.
The kiss is gratitude, not seduction.
He receives it without recoil or fantasy, simply as what it is: a human gesture that needs no interpretation.
3. Two mirrors for one man
Through these two visitors, the film shows how presence becomes a test.
Takashi fails it — his insecurity turns contact into theft and avoidance.
Aya passes it — her intuition turns contact into respect.
Hirayama remains unchanged by both: he neither punishes nor pursues.
The contrast reveals his centeredness more clearly than any monologue could.
4. The wider lesson
In ordinary life, serenity provokes two kinds of responses.
From the restless: irritation, mockery, or appropriation.
From the receptive: quiet curiosity and spontaneous affection.
The film lets both reactions unfold, then watches Hirayama absorb them without disturbance.
That equanimity — staying untouched yet available — is the true evidence of his transformation.
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| Niko and Hirayama |
Niko — The Innocent Gravity of Affection
When Niko arrives at Hirayama’s apartment, she doesn’t know what she’s walking into.
She has fled from a world of luxury and control — the same world he once escaped.
Her presence is impulsive, but her intuition is accurate: she senses, without understanding, that something in this man’s quiet life feels true.
1. The spontaneous pull
At first she simply observes him — his methodical folding of bedding, the small plants on the windowsill, the slow preparation for work.
Where others might find monotony, she feels safety.
Her eyes widen as she watches him move: each gesture exact, without irritation or haste.
The attraction that forms in her is not romantic; it’s the magnetic curiosity of a young soul meeting peace for the first time.
She doesn’t yet have words for it, so she stays close — sharing meals, following him through his day, imitating his small rituals.
For Hirayama, this attention is disarming.
It’s been years since anyone looked at his life without judgment.
In her gaze, he meets a reflection of his own lost innocence — the unguarded capacity to wonder.
Something softens between them, a connection beyond age or role: a human resonance untouched by purpose.
2. The purity of their bond
The film never turns this affection into sentimentality.
She doesn’t idealize him as a saint, nor does he treat her as a child to instruct.
They simply coexist — sharing ordinary tasks, quietly synchronized.
Their relationship shows that true intimacy needs no possession.
For a few days, they live in unforced harmony: a girl discovering stillness, and a man rediscovering warmth.
Her presence draws out a tender side of him that routine had buried.
He buys her a meal, shows her his favorite tree, smiles more often.
Yet even here, there is no claim.
The affection remains transparent — a fleeting, luminous connection where both are briefly healed by each other’s company.
3. What she awakens
Niko’s innocent curiosity is the first pure mirror of his inner transformation.
Others around him — Takashi, Aya, even his sister later — approach him with motives.
Niko approaches with being.
She validates his way of life not through words but through simple joy in it.
In that mirroring, Hirayama experiences something he didn’t expect: that stillness can attract rather than repel, that peace itself radiates an invisible warmth.
Her spontaneous attraction proves that serenity is not sterile — it quietly invites life.
4. The unspoken farewell
When Keiko arrives to take her daughter home, Niko’s departure feels like a change in weather, not a rupture.
The days they shared remain whole.
She returns to her world carrying a trace of his silence, and he stays behind with a softened heart.
No promises, no guilt — only the lingering tenderness of a connection that needed no story to justify itself.
Through Niko, Perfect Days reveals that even after collapse, the human heart can love again — not by wanting, but by witnessing.
She is not the cause of his tears later; she is the reason he can cry cleanly.
Her presence restored trust in the world’s goodness, preparing him to face the final reconciliation that awaited him beyond her.
Keiko — The Final Mirror
Keiko enters the story not as an antagonist but as the embodiment of the world Hirayama once belonged to — status, order, the logic of control.
Her arrival completes the circle that Niko began: the daughter’s spontaneous affection opens the door; the sister’s visit brings the last reckoning.
1. The mirror of the old life
When Keiko steps from the chauffeured car, it’s as if the past itself has pulled up to the curb.
Her polished manners, her nervous small talk, the way she looks around his modest apartment — all of it belongs to the realm of surfaces he has left behind.
For her, the brother’s new existence is incomprehensible.
She still believes meaning comes from achievement and recognition.
That’s why her final question — “Do you really clean toilets for a living?” — lands like a confession of her own blindness.
She can’t imagine that what looks like degradation could also be freedom.
2. The father and the death of Logos
Her message about their father’s dementia pierces the film’s calm.
The patriarch who once embodied command, success, and judgment — the Logos principle itself — is now dissolving into incoherence.
Keiko pleads with Hirayama to visit, assuring him that “he won’t behave the way he did before.”
But he refuses, not out of resentment, but because he understands: the man she describes no longer exists, and what remains needs no reconciliation.
To go back would be to re-enter the theatre of hierarchy.
Silence is truer than speech.
The tears that follow are therefore not for the sister, nor for Niko.
They are for the father — and for the entire civilization of command that is now ending inside him.
In those tears, Hirayama mourns and forgives at once.
He weeps for the man who built towers of control only to watch them crumble, and for himself, who inherited that will to mastery and finally laid it down.
3. The sister’s unintended blessing
Keiko doesn’t grasp any of this, yet her visit serves its purpose.
By confronting him with the dying father, she hands him the last lesson: even Logos must return to Shakti, even authority must melt into care.
Her incomprehension protects the purity of his realization.
When she leaves, the old world leaves with her — polite, anxious, efficient, and already obsolete.
4. The release
After she drives away, he stands alone and cries.
No camera push-in, no music; just the raw sound of a man whose lineage has dissolved.
These tears are the final purification.
They wash away the remnants of pride and duty, leaving only witness.
He has nothing left to justify — not to family, not to society, not to himself.
What remains is a quiet wholeness that no one else can see, but that the viewer can feel like air after rain.
In Tantric language, this is the moment when Dhumāvatī’s veil becomes transparent.
All stories — of success, guilt, redemption — have burned out.
What continues is life itself, unframed, immaculate.
The Skytree and the Trees — Two Ways of Rising
Throughout Perfect Days, the camera repeatedly frames the Tokyo Skytree above the city haze.
It is impossible to miss: a spear of glass and steel piercing the clouds, the proud emblem of modern Japan.
Each time it appears, Hirayama is somewhere below — on his bicycle, wiping a mirror, or tending to a tree.
The contrast is deliberate: two kinds of ascent, two religions of order.
1. The vertical dream
The Skytree represents the world he left — the architecture of mastery, surveillance, and transmission.
It sends signals, connects millions, measures everything.
Like his former life in business, it embodies the conviction that meaning comes from height and reach.
It rises through the air but does not breathe it.
2. The living ascent
The trees he waters are another kind of tower: porous, rooted, cyclical.
They rise by surrendering to gravity, not defying it.
Where the Skytree seeks permanence through engineering, the tree accepts impermanence through renewal.
Every leaf it sheds becomes food for its own future.
For Hirayama, tending to them is not a retreat from civilization but a quiet rebellion against the myth of progress.
He no longer wants to broadcast; he wants to photosynthesize.
3. The lesson in contrast
Seen together, these images form the film’s final koan:
What does it mean to rise?
To climb higher than others, or to deepen one’s roots until height no longer matters?
The Skytree measures achievement in meters; the forest measures it in oxygen.
The film sides gently but unmistakably with the latter.
Every time the Skytree glitters in the distance, Hirayama’s small act of care — washing a toilet, wiping a leaf — reclaims the sacred from abstraction.
4. The closing stillness
By the end, we understand why he no longer looks up when the Skytree appears.
It is no longer his axis.
He has found another direction of transcendence: the one that goes downward, into earth, routine, and compassion.
His life has become the opposite of a signal tower — not transmitting, but receiving; not imposing, but listening.
In Tantric terms, the Skytree is the ascending current of Śiva, the impulse to define and build;
the trees embody the descending grace of Śakti, which turns even decay into nourishment.
Hirayama now lives where the two currents meet: a point of silent equipoise where doing and being are the same.
The Cigarettes and the Highballs — Compassion After the Blow
The final trial of Hirayama’s journey arrives without warning.
He enters his familiar restaurant, the one place of warmth in his solitary routine, and through the window glimpses the owner — the woman whose quiet kindness had become a rhythm in his evenings — embracing a man.
No explanation, no words; just that image.
A sudden stillness, and then he walks away.
1. The moment of exposure
This is not jealousy in the ordinary sense.
It’s the sting of being reminded that even gentle attachments can still ache.
For all his detachment, some thread of unspoken affection had remained — a small human longing woven into his daily order.
When he sees her in another’s arms, the last illusion that he has transcended pain collapses.
And yet he does not react.
He does what only the truly tempered heart can do: he absorbs the blow and keeps walking.
2. The descent to the river
He stops at a vending stand, buys cigarettes and three bottled highballs, and heads for the riverbank.
The gesture feels almost adolescent — a man seeking consolation in small vices — but in truth it is a ritual of honesty.
He allows himself to feel, to stumble, to cough on the first cigarette like a novice.
No mask of serenity, no denial of being wounded.
This is not regression but integration: he is learning to include weakness in peace.
3. The meeting of two sorrows
Then the man from the restaurant — the very one he saw embracing her — approaches.
He turns out to be her ex-husband, dying of cancer, visiting to make peace before death.
What could have been an awkward confrontation becomes a quiet sacrament of understanding.
They share cigarettes, drinks, and simple talk.
The dying man confides his story and asks Hirayama to look after her.
In response, Hirayama doesn’t moralize or comfort — he offers play.
They chase each other’s shadows like children, two ghosts reconciled without words.
4. The true meaning of the scene
The film ends not with transcendence but with shared fragility.
Hirayama doesn’t retreat from the pain of seeing love and loss intertwined; he stays present enough to transform it into tenderness.
The alcohol, the smoke, the laughter — these are no longer escapes but emblems of compassion.
Having faced humiliation, heartbreak, and death, he can now sit beside them unarmed.
It is the last proof that his detachment has matured into love.
In Tantric symbolism, this is the moment when Śiva and Śakti rejoin in the ashes — the sacred and the ordinary no longer distinct.
The cigarette smoke, the river air, the mortal conversation: all shimmer with the same consciousness.
The one who once sought purity now abides in wholeness.
Conscious Defeat as Liberation
By the end of Perfect Days, nothing “happens,” yet everything is complete.
Hirayama has passed through every gate that once defined a man’s worth: work, family, love, dignity, even purity.
Each of them was taken, tested, or transformed — until nothing remained to defend.
What looks like defeat from the outside has ripened into the deepest kind of victory: the freedom not to need triumph.
1. The pattern of dissolutions
Aya showed him that beauty can be near without being possessed.
Niko revealed that innocence still recognizes peace, even if it cannot explain it.
Keiko brought the last news from the world of control, and through her he mourned and forgave his father — the death of Logos itself.
The restaurant owner and her ex-husband closed the circle: the return of tenderness and mortality, teaching that love and loss are inseparable movements of the same current.
Each encounter stripped him further of interpretation.
He is no longer the recluse who escaped life, nor the ascetic who rejected it.
He is simply present — porous, undefended, alive.
2. The descent beyond transcendence
Most spiritual stories climb upward; this one sinks gracefully downward.
From the tower of business success to a janitor’s schedule, from transcendence to embodiment, from control to surrender.
In that descent lies the real ascent: when the need to rise collapses, life itself begins to flow through.
The Tokyo Skytree still stands, its lights flickering above him, but he no longer looks up.
He has found a humbler vertical — the one inside the breath.
3. The human form of awakening
In psychological language, Hirayama has completed individuation not by expanding but by contracting into essence.
He has made peace with his shadow — the need for approval, the ache for recognition, the impulse to master — and let them dissolve into daily ritual.
Washing toilets, watering trees, listening to Patti Smith — these are now his liturgies.
He is no longer seeking meaning; he is performing meaning through care.
It’s the life of someone who has been conquered by grace.
4. The tantric resolution
In Kaula understanding, he stands where Dhumāvatī leaves her disciples: among the ashes, but smiling.
She has stripped him of every story, and he has thanked her for it.
What remains is not silence as withdrawal, but silence as communion —
the hum of being that needs no confirmation.
He has not escaped samsāra; he has made samsāra transparent.
Conscious defeat is how freedom enters the world.
The Goddess wins not by elevating her devotee, but by undoing him — until even defeat becomes luminous.
Hirayama is not enlightened in the cinematic sense; he is simply real, and that is rarer.
The film ends where awakening always truly begins: in the small, unglamorous mercy of an ordinary day.
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