Wim Wenders’s new film Perfect Days is perhaps the only Oscar nominee in history to be based on a series of Japanese public toilets. Just when you thought we’d exhausted every conceivable type of intellectual property, here comes the German auteur to offer a whole new definition of IP. In 2022, Wenders was approached by the Tokyo Toilet art project, which had commissioned leading architects and designers to create 17 toilets spread across the city’s fashionable Shibuya district. They hoped Wenders might make a documentary about their sparkling new facilities. Instead, he envisioned a simple drama about a man who cleans them.
We get to know Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) through his daily routine: the toilets he cleans thoroughly and methodically, the public baths where he does the same to himself, and the frequent commutes where he listens to his favourite music on cassette tapes that intrigue and baffle the film’s younger characters. These tapes are the key to unlocking his character, so when Wenders decided to open the film with Hirayama sliding in a battered cassette of The Animals’ eerie 1964 recording of “The House of the Rising Sun”, he worried it might not be the right choice.
“I felt I was imposing myself, and that this was cultural appropriation,” says the grey-haired 78-year-old thoughtfully from a hotel room in London, eyes twinkling behind blue-framed glasses. “I said, wait a minute. This is a Japanese character a few years younger than me, can I impose my musical taste? This is not a good thing!”
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 