The star of Tampopo, Babel and The Eel reveals how it felt to share the screen with 17 stunning Tokyo lavatories in this joyously strange, Oscar-tipped film about a cleaner
Photo: Cleaning up … Yakusho stars as Hirayama in Perfect Days, which won him best actor at Cannes. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
15 February 2024 | James Porteous | Clipper Media
15 February 2024 | Xan Brooks | The Guardian
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.”
Exterior view. A white area and a white hemisphere has emerged inside a park located on Nanago Dori in Hatagaya, Shibuya.
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.
