Dec 2, 2024: Kathleen Rooney, Perfect Days in Imperfect Times

*

This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

*

A couple of the many reasons why I enjoy writing in all genres, but especially essays, are:

1. a desire for a sustained period of peaceful stability, and
2. an attraction to a structured rhythm, 

neither of which is always possible to maintain in life.

In the introduction to their certain-to-be-indispensable Rose Metal Press Field Guide to the Lyric Essay (coming out in 2027 and seen so far only by Abby Beckel and me, their editors), Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Ann Roripaugh explain the lyric essay expansively as “creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language—to resonances of sound and imagery.”

On election night, rather than torturing ourselves by obsessively refreshing the returns, my spouse and fellow writer Martin Seay and I watched Wim Wenders’ 2023 movie Perfect Days, an elegant spiritual drama about a fifty-something bachelor and Tokyo public toilet cleaner named Hirayama, played by Kōji Yakusho. 

My friend, DePaul colleague, and fellow Poems While You Wait poet Eric Plattner (who shares my affinity for hybrid genres) recommended the film. It’s a movie with characteristics of a lyric essay, kind of like those of Agnes Varda, in which the calm, gently comic, forgiving focus on people and the places where they live provides maps to their subjects’ inner lives, honoring the subtle interior shifts we all experience, even if these feel small in comparison to the cataclysms of geopolitics or whatever. 

The movie Perfect Days is fiction but feels at times like a documentary thanks to Wenders’ attention to the minutiae of this particular guy’s day-in-day-out dedication to a literally shitty job that he performs with more intention and care than a lot of people ever dedicate to anything. 

*

The toilets themselves work almost as supporting actors, beautifully designed and sculptural, looking as much like tiny houses you might want to live in or art installations you might pay to see as they do mere public amenities. 

*

In fact, the movie originated because “Wenders had been invited to Japan as the guest of a prominent Japanese businessman who hoped that the director might want to make a series of short films featuring the toilets, which had been conceived as showcases for Japanese artistry and hygienic mastery.”  

*

Wenders instead decided he wanted to make a feature-length film about a fictional character, but the toilets appear and re-appear in a meticulous pattern, punctuating the story of Hirayama and underscoring his own meticulousness.

*

Wenders uses repetition to show how Hirayama—in his humble apartment in the shadow of the Tokyo Skytree and at the toilets he tends to in the high-end Shibuya district—creates a structured rhythm within the chaos of the city, carving out his own patch of peaceful stability. 

*

Over and over again, we see him wake at dawn without an alarm, roll up his sleeping mat, brush his teeth, wash his face, spritz his beloved plants, don his blue coveralls, attach his numerous toilet keys, purchase his coffee from a vending machine, and drive his van to work while listening to cassettes of Patti Smith, Otis Redding, and the Animals. 

Gradually, lyrically, Wenders blends variations into this repetition, showing how little obstacles—his flaky co-worker quitting and leaving Hirayama to spend a day cleaning all the toilets solo, his niece coming to crash at his tiny apartment after a fight with her wealthy mother, Hirayama’s sister—sometimes disrupt his clockwork, but never keep him from doing his job or stop him from being steady and kind to everybody he comes in contact with, including the trees in the parks where he works and the users of the toilets who interrupt him at his cleaning.

*

The combination of documentary and lyrical techniques made the movie feel not just essayistic but also ritualistic, as much a meditation as a narrative, and made me think a lot about structure—structuring a life and structuring a story. True care and attention—showing up reliably and noticing what’s there—are basically sacred but essentially rare in art and in life. 

Using the patterning that Czerwiec and Roripaugh cite to create resonances of sound and imagery, Wenders manages to effectively dramatize and celebrate the less flashy but noble aspects of being an ethical person.

There’s a trend of what I’ve come to call neglect-masquerading-as-care where people fail to show up and support others in the ways they said they would do, while spinning this unreliability as concern: teachers letting students not turn in work—work that would help them learn and grow and take them outside of themselves and into other worldviews—because the student is vaguely “struggling” (and/or the teacher doesn’t want to have to do feedback), for instance, or bailing on commitments to friends and loved ones and declaring it self-care. It’s unpopular to say, probably, but: that sucks. That behavior sucks. It lets everybody down, including the bailer, and is the flat-out opposite of true care, because making demands—as in challenging oneself and others to commit and see something through—is a form of love. 

Perfect Days, with its structured rhythm matching that of its lowkey heroic protagonist, feels compelling because it’s life-affirming to watch a work of art that is in huge part a reflection on keeping your word and showing up and giving your all no matter what. 

I used to think that just showing up and paying attention were pretty low bars, but lately I think they are everything.

It’s hard to talk about stuff like this without sounding self-important or righteous. Wisely, Wenders almost never has Hirayama talk. In the way a lyric essay can use white space and leave stuff out, the script trusts audiences to get the point without excess explanation. Yakusho—who won Best Actor at Cannes—plays Hirayama with the expressiveness, humor, and pathos of a silent movie performer. 

As such, we see that he’s the kind of special person who notices and appreciates—or as needed ameliorates—whatever a situation presents. He takes a film photograph of a tree every day on his lunch break, for example. He uses a small mirror like a dentist would use to see if there’s anything gross encrusted on the underside of a given toilet seat, then scrubs vigorously. 

For leisure, Hirayama frequents the cheap paperback section of his neighborhood bookshop. Whenever he checks out, the woman who runs the shop offers some comment on his selection. As he purchases a book by Ayo Kōda, she says, “she deserves more recognition. She uses the same words we do yet there’s something so special.”

*

Because Hirayama so seldom speaks, when he does, his words carry extra weight. As he and his niece are riding their bikes along the Sumida River, she tries to start planning her next visit, but he reminds her “Next time is next time! Now is now!” They repeat it back and forth, a playful chant between them.

*

Shot by shot, toilet by toilet, Perfect Days shows one guy—deserving more recognition, using the same materials we do—riding through assorted indignities and vicissitudes, but persisting with his own essential interests and desires. There are lots of ways to give rhythm to one’s life, one’s art, and to keep showing up and being awesome in a world full of shit. 

*

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press. Her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023, and her picture book Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister Beth Rooney, is forthcoming. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.