Perfect Days (2023) Review – Another Today, Beginning Again

 

Header illustration for the film review essay of Perfect Days (2023).

Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

Perfect Days (2023) left me sitting quietly after the credits — not with an answer, but with a question I hadn't thought to ask before. What if a perfect day is not the one where everything goes right, but simply the one that begins again? Hirayama wakes, folds his futon, waters his plants, chooses a cassette tape. He does this every day. And watching him, something in me slowly loosened — the assumption that a life worth living must be building toward something. Perhaps attention itself is the destination. Perhaps the day that simply begins again, without fanfare, without resolution, is already enough.

🎥 Film Overview

Director	Wim Wenders
Release	May 23, 2023 (Cannes); December 22, 2023 (Japan); February 7, 2024 (USA)
Runtime	123 minutes
Cast	Kōji Yakusho (Hirayama), Tokio Emoto (Takashi), Arisa Nakano (Niko), Aoi Yamada (Aya), Yumi Asō (Keiko), Min Tanaka (Tomoyama)

📖 Story Summary

In the Japanese drama Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged toilet cleaner named Hirayama moves through his days in Shibuya — a quiet film about routine, attention, and what it might mean to live an ordinary life fully. He wakes before dawn, follows the same ritual, drives the same routes, eats lunch in the same park. He photographs sunlight through leaves. He reads before sleeping. He dreams in black and white.

The film follows approximately two weeks of this life. Small disruptions arrive: a younger colleague who disappears; a niece who turns up unannounced; a chance encounter with a dying stranger; a brief, incomplete moment with his sister that hints at a past the film never fully explains. None of these disruptions resolve into drama. They pass through his days the way weather passes — leaving traces, but not craters.

What Perfect Days is truly about is harder to name than its surface suggests. It is about attention — the practice of noticing what is actually present. It is about the quiet, unresolved question of whether the life Hirayama has chosen is contentment or concealment. And it is about the face of a man who has decided, for reasons the film wisely declines to explain, that this particular life is the one he wants to be living.

🌸 Key Themes

The Practice of Attention

The film's original working title was Komorebi — the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through leaves, the precise interplay of light and shadow that Hirayama photographs obsessively with a small film camera he develops himself. He cannot see what he has captured until much later. He photographs it anyway.

This is the film's central image and its central practice: attention to what is actually present, without needing to possess or preserve it perfectly. Hirayama does not accumulate things. He accumulates moments — carefully, deliberately, with something that functions as gratitude. The film watches this practice without romanticizing it. It simply shows what it looks like when someone has learned, for whatever reason, to be where they are.

Contentment or Concealment

Perfect Days is too honest a film to present Hirayama's life as simple enlightenment. His sister's visit opens a crack in the surface: he comes from a wealthy family, and what he is doing in that Shibuya toilet truck is clearly not what was expected of him. The film leaves the reasons deliberately unclear. Perhaps he suffered something and withdrew. Perhaps he chose this, fully and freely. Perhaps the distinction does not matter as much as we assume.

What the film suggests, quietly, is that the question of whether Hirayama is at peace or in flight may not have a clean answer — and that this ambiguity is itself a form of honesty about how people actually live. Most of us are both. The life we have made may be both the life we wanted and the life we retreated into. Holding both possibilities without resolving them is one of the things great films can do that most things cannot.

Every Day, Ending and Beginning Again

Hirayama's days end with brief, black-and-white dream sequences — fragments of the day just passed, assembled into something that feels like the mind sorting through what mattered. Then morning comes again, and the routine begins once more. The film's structure enacts its theme: each day is complete in itself. Each day ends. Each day is followed by another that is neither better nor worse, simply the next one.

This is not presented as defeat. It is presented as the texture of a life in which the present has been, somehow, accepted — not resignedly, but with something closer to grace. The final scene crystallizes this in a way that resists easy description: Hirayama's face as he drives to work, music playing, the city moving past the windows, everything he is feeling and not feeling visible at once.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Wim Wenders and Kōji Yakusho's Performance

Few filmmakers working today could have brought the necessary restraint to Perfect Days — a film that must hold a viewer's attention through repetition without ever becoming inert. Wim Wenders, the German director known for Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), shoots with patience and without agenda, watching Hirayama the way Hirayama watches the trees: closely, with full willingness to stay with what is there. The film was originally conceived as a short documentary about the Tokyo Toilet Project — seventeen architecturally designed public restrooms in Shibuya — and shot in only seventeen days, a compression that gives it an unusual aliveness.

The film was built around Kōji Yakusho, and everything it achieves passes through him. He speaks very little. He expresses almost nothing directly. And yet the interior life he communicates — through the way he looks at things, the particular quality of his stillness, the micro-expressions that cross his face during the final sequence — is among the richest any actor has offered on screen in recent years. His Best Actor prize at Cannes 2023 was not a courtesy. It was recognition of something genuinely rare: a performance that conveys a complete human being through accumulation rather than declaration. The final scene, with Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" playing, cycles through grief, acceptance, something like joy, something like sorrow — all in a single held shot. It is one of the finest pieces of screen acting of the decade.

Cinematography, Music, and the Grammar of Routine

Cinematographer Franz Lustig shoots the film's repetitions as variations rather than repetitions — finding in the same routes and rituals something slightly different each time, the way the same walk looks different depending on the light. The black-and-white dream sequences, filmed by Wenders' wife Donata Wenders, introduce a softer, more fragmentary visual register that deepens the sense of a man whose inner life is richer and stranger than his outer life suggests.

Hirayama's cassette tapes are not background. They are character. Each morning he reaches into a box and chooses what he will listen to — Lou Reed, Otis Redding, Van Morrison, Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground — and the choice is neither random nor performed. It is, as Wenders has described, one of the few ways Hirayama fully expresses who he was and who he remains. The music carries the life he has put aside. Listening to it is not nostalgia so much as maintenance — keeping some part of himself alive that the rest of his days does not require.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: MUBI (UK, Ireland, Latin America, select regions)

Physical: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray and DVD, US)

Also available for rent/purchase: Apple TV, Amazon Video, Fandango at Home, Google Play Movies

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its quiet drama surface, Perfect Days asks a deeper question: what if the life we are already living, attended to with full care, is already enough?

Perfect Days does not argue that Hirayama's life is the right life, or that routine is wisdom, or that simplicity is virtue. It simply watches one man's days with sustained, generous attention, and trusts that this watching is itself sufficient. What it leaves behind is quieter than an argument and more lasting: the image of a face that has learned to hold, simultaneously, everything it has lost and everything that remains.

More than a year after its release, Perfect Days remains one of the most quietly radical films about ordinary life in recent memory — a Japanese drama about attention and routine that still has something genuine to say about what the word perfect might actually mean.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have ever wondered whether a quieter, more deliberate life might be possible — and felt both drawn to and uncertain about that possibility. Perfect for a slow evening when you want something that asks nothing of you except to be present. Recommended for viewers who loved Shoplifters (2018), Kamome Diner (2006), or Little Forest (2018) — films where the texture of daily life, attended to carefully, becomes its own kind of meaning.

💭 Personal Note

In Perfect Days, Hirayama's face in the final scene is not easily defined. It seems to be smiling, and it seems to be holding back tears — relief and resignation, sorrow and calm, all of it passing through at once. Perhaps it is the face of someone who already knows that anything can happen in a life, who has stopped being surprised by this, and started, quietly, to accept it.

And so the question arrives on its own: what is a perfect day? A day that passes without incident. A day of sufficient rest. A day when something difficult resolves and the weight lifts. Or perhaps simply another day — one in which grief has been met, loss has been passed through, and a person returns anyway to their place and continues. The return itself the thing.

Hirayama's final expression did not look like the face of someone whose life had become perfect. It looked like the face of someone who had accepted that life continues without becoming perfect, and had found in that acceptance something that functions, quietly, like peace. And in that moment, it seemed possible that a perfect day is not a special day at all — only another today, beginning again.

완벽한 날이란 특별한 하루가 아니라, 완벽하지 않은 채로도 다시 시작되는 오늘인지 모른다.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about imperfection, acceptance, and the quiet courage of beginning again feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

What does a perfect day look like to you — and has that definition changed over time?

Is there something in Hirayama's way of moving through the world that you recognize in yourself, or that you find yourself quietly wanting?

If you had to choose one cassette tape to listen to on your commute tomorrow — something that carried who you were and who you remain — what would it be?

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If Perfect Days' quiet attention to ordinary life and the practice of being present resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• Shoplifters (2018) — A family held together by the daily choice to remain
• Little Forest (2018) — The rhythm of seasons and the slow work of finding where one belongs
• Kamome Diner (2006) — A quiet place, built deliberately, where ordinary days become their own kind of peace
• Bread of Happiness (2012) — The small rituals of nourishment, and what they quietly hold
• After the Storm (2016) — Another Hirayama, circling what he cannot quite return to or release

Each film offers a different angle on the same quiet truth: that the life we are actually living, attended to with care, is already something worth being present for.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where ordinary days, attended to with care, turn out to be enough.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.