Wim Wenders’ serene, understated film is a captivating love letter to Japan and pleasures of simple living.
Meet Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a taciturn man in his sixties. Every morning, he wakes up alone in his tiny apartment, rolls up the futon mattress, trims his moustache and brushes his teeth, sprinkles his beloved plants, puts on his uniform and heads outside, pausing at the door to look up at the sky and greet the day with a radiant smile. Then he gets a can of coffee from the street vending machine, and hops into a van to start his working day cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo.
Hirayama’s ascetic life is solitary and a day may pass without him saying a single word to anyone. It is also a life stripped down to basics: an old film camera; a few cassettes of Western classics from the 60s and 70s (Velvet Underground, The Kinks, Patti Smith); a shelf full of second-hand books. The bare summary of his life could have just as easily made for a relentlessly bleak portrait of loneliness, alienation and repetitive drudgery, but instead this lovely, life-affirming film about living fully in the present couldn’t have been any further away from misery.
It probably helps that Japanese public toilets are architectural wonders and would win the beauty contest of world’s public toilets hands down. But the real difference is Hirayama’s mindset, and his gift for taking pleasure in life’s little, seemingly insignificant details. He has a profound connection with nature and often pauses to notice the beauty of trees against the sky, or the intricate play of their shadows. Unlike his sloppy, feckless young colleague, he performs the daily cleaning with the artisanal care and attention to detail. Though he’s reserved and spare with words, Hirayama shows warmth and generosity to everyone around him. He takes notice of people, whether it’s a vagrant in the park or a girl eating lunch on a bench next to his.
By following Hirayama’s life day in, day out, you get slowly immersed into his routine and come to appreciate the small ways his days differ from one another, despite the seeming monotony. These gentle rhythms are beautifully put across by Wenders, with the help of cinematography that captures daily Tokyo through images that are not touristy and yet crisp and gorgeous.
Hirayama remains an enigma, with a more affluent and privileged past life hinted on but never fully explored. He is never less than intensely compelling thanks to Yakusho’s touching, expressive, mostly silent performance. Later in the film, Hirayama’s routine is shaken up by the people from his past, which doesn’t force him to reconsider his life but still manages to unearth some buried heartache. It all culminates in a stunning final scene set to Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, with camera locked on Hirayama’s face as conflicting emotions of joy and pain dance across his features, a wonderful ending to a wonderful movie.
P.S. The movie doesn’t preach the point, but you can see definitely see that the rejection of the digital and its distractions is essential to Hirayama’s harmonious lifestyle. My phone and internet in general is a source of so many great amazing things, however I’m also constantly aware of the wall it can put up between myself and the external world.
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