Perfect Days

Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and appears content with a life built around repetition. His days have a fixed shape: tending young maple saplings that he will later plant in a park, driving his van at dawn with a cassette player running, and moving through his rounds. Away from work he listens to rock music on tape, reads books from a local shop, and photographs trees with a film camera. A series of unexpected encounters gradually unsettles his routine and reveals more about his past and his character.

Wim Wenders directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Takuma Takasaki; both also produced it alongside Koji Yanai. It is the nineteenth of twenty-two features Wenders has directed in chronological order, coming after Submergence and before Anselm. Koji Yakusho plays Hirayama, with Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Aoi Yamada, Yumi Aso and Sayuri Ishikawa among the cast. The production, mounted by Master Mind, Wenders Images and Spoon as a German-Japanese collaboration, cost about 14 million USD and took roughly 26 million USD worldwide, a clear return on its budget.

On IMDb the film holds 7.9/10 from around 102,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.8/10 from just over two thousand votes. A critics' rating of 8.3/10 from 186 reviews places it above both audience scores, indicating stronger enthusiasm among reviewers than among the wider public.