124 min | PG | February 7, 2024 | Neon
A man cleans public toilets in Tokyo. He rises before dawn, listens to old cassettes, photographs trees, and says almost nothing. Wim Wenders builds a whole life out of that, and dares you to call it small.
Hirayama cleans public toilets across Tokyo. He wakes before sunrise, folds his bedding, tends his seedlings, and drives to work listening to cassette tapes. The film follows his routine across a string of nearly identical days. It is not a film about a man who hates his job or dreams of escaping it. It is a film about a man who has built a life of order and attention and finds it sufficient. Wim Wenders turns repetition into the subject, and lets the small variations carry the weight.
Koji Yakusho plays Hirayama almost entirely without dialogue. He builds the character out of glances, posture, and the way he looks up at trees through his viewfinder. Yakusho lets contentment and buried sorrow occupy the same face. Tokio Emoto plays Takashi, his younger coworker, with restless energy that throws Hirayama’s stillness into relief. Arisa Nakano plays his runaway niece Niko, and her brief stay cracks the routine open to reveal the family Hirayama left behind. Yumi Aso plays her mother Keiko, whose single visit tells you everything the film withholds about his past.
Wenders and co-writer Takuma Takasaki structure the film as a series of mornings, each beginning with the same shots of Hirayama waking and stepping outside to look at the sky. The repetition is the editing strategy. The cassette tapes function as the score, with Hirayama choosing each song and the soundtrack becoming a record of his inner life. Wenders shoots the toilets themselves as architecture, holding on tile and light and the discipline of the cleaning. Black-and-white dream sequences interrupt the days, made of dappled shadow and overlapping images that Hirayama photographs by instinct.
This is a film that refuses to manufacture drama and trusts that a well-observed life is drama enough. Hirayama’s contentment is real, but the film never pretends it came free. The past is present in every visit and every silence, and the routine is both a discipline and a wall. Wenders finds in a toilet cleaner a study of how a person decides what is enough and holds to it. The film ends on Yakusho’s face and lets it do what no monologue could.