By Perfect Days is a 2023 movie originally made in Japanese language. It is the story of a man named Hirayama, who is a middle-aged person living in Tokyo, Japan and earns a living by cleaning public toilets. He enjoys his work and does it in a meditative trance.
The movie continues in a loop of his daily routine and depicts the way he does everything in a routine manner – doing the same things everyday, eating the same things; so much so that even his weekends have a routine. The movie travels with him and gives a glimpse into his life and some of the other characters he is associated with like his colleague, niece, the librarian, weekend dinner restaurant owner etc.
Mostly movies tend to delve into a particular portion in the life where there is some incident or adventure and then builds on that storyline, however, this movie is a marked deviation from that – this movie delves into a Zen mode – keeping things on repeat; but mindfully. However, even though his life runs on repeat outwardly, his emotions do not follow a pre-determined routine and thus his mental state of mind is dynamic. Rightly so, in the lives that we lead daily, which is also mundane and routinely, what changes is our emotions. The people whom we interact with trigger our deepest memories; the real adventure builds up in our minds. Just as all adventures are not always happy ones, so is our state of mind.
Reading online reviews and thoughts about this movie seems as to make Hirayama in the light of a villain for displaying his emotions. For example, Hirayama looks up at the sky every morning when he gets out of his house and smiles. However, when his emotions at a turmoil his smile disappears and his eyes vacantly look up into the sky. Online viewers feel that if his routine Zen life is disturbed at small inconveniences of his personal life, then is it really worth striving for it? And that is the real point – it is not just people with big responsibilities and positions who are allowed to show emotion; even the daily workers and housewives are humans and their emotions too seep in to their daily actions. So when Hirayama does not smile looking at the sky, it is not a disturbance of his routine; his routine is well in place the moment he looks up at the sky – the change is his emotion and that decides whether he smiles or grimaces.
Perfect Days is a movie for all those who seem to feel their life is a continuous loop – get up, chores, go to work, chores and sleep. In between this loop, have you attempted to achieve your Zen being? Are you waiting for that perfect holiday to look into yourself? That holiday will never come and even if you were on a lifelong holiday, that too will become a routine. Hirayama has at least made an attempt to look into himself every moment of his waking hour – he laughs, cries and works attentively; have we even tried?
