This week I went to see the film ‘Perfect Days’ ( on my own as it happens). The subject of the film is a Tokyo toilet cleaner who barely speaks throughout. Very little happens. He cleans toilets. He stares at the trees. He cleans some more toilets. He takes a cutting from a maple tree to take home to plant. He has his lunchtime sandwich on the same park bench he always goes to. Another toilet to clean. Then he goes to the bar he always goes to after work. Then he reads, until he finally falls asleep, and dreams.
Oddly enough it is a very engaging film, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I have always been fascinated by the philosophy of Zen. ‘Zen’ is the Japanese way of pronouncing ‘Cha’n’, which is Chinese way of pronouncing the Indian Sanskrit word, ‘Dhyana’ or ‘Sunya’. This can be translated as ‘meditation’ or ‘contemplation’, but also as ‘emptiness ‘or ‘void’ Zen, then, is the ‘Buddhism of nothingness’. And in that spirit, everything that ‘happens’ in the film is internal rather than external, expressed through the marvellously sensitive features of the protagonist, Hirayama, played by Hoji Yakusho.
The film was almost universally well received, but it felt especially resonant to me. Because it felt like my life - without the toilets. The film has several layers of meaning, but I think it is most potent as a reflection on solitude.
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