Film Review: Tic-Tac-Toe in ‘Perfect Days’

Tic-tac-toe. Noughts and crosses. Xs and Os.

These are the names different people use to describe the same pencil-and-paper game.

Behind the scenes of Wim Wender’s PERFECT DAYS, 2023. © MASTER MIND Ltd.

A lot, yet very little happens in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, an affecting portrait of a public toilet janitor in Tokyo. Hirayama’s daily routine is almost perfectly clockwork: he wakes up to the sound of a neighbour sweeping, suits up in his “The Tokyo Toilet” uniform, and as he steps out of his door…he looks to the sky and heaves a happy sigh, regardless of how he is actually feeling.

I could rave about Perfect Days’ sharp-witted East-meets-West sensibility. I could praise its aesthetic of repetition with a difference (his days are, in colloquial terms, “same same but different”). I could anatomise Hirayama’s cassette tape and thrifted $1 book collections. But instead, this review will focus on the film’s relationship with tic-tac-toe, the childhood game of dotting paper with Xs and Os.

Midway through the film, in one of the public toilets that he routinely cleans, Hirayama chances upon a scrap piece of paper tucked away in a crevice near the sink. In his professional haste, he unfolds the paper, which reveals a freshly drawn tic-tac-toe diagram with a first move already made, and unthinkingly disposes of it.

After his shift, as he unwinds with cassette music in his minivan, he entertains an intrusive thought. Hurriedly shuffling through the day’s trash, he recovers the slip of paper, and decides to begin a spirited game of tic-tac-toe with the stranger. They each make a move everyday, returning the paper to the same crevice after an X or O has been penned, till…they end in a stalemate, a draw.

Those savvy at tic-tac-toe would know that a draw commonly occurs. In game theory, tic-tac-toe is a futile game because it permits a tie when optimal moves are made by each player (and most adults, I believe, can perform the best play). It’s fascinating, then, that the stranger and Hirayama commit to a child’s game, play like adults, and expect not to come out on top. By the last few moves, it is clear both players recognise the inevitability of a tied game. Still, they make their marks on the scrap paper ever so enthusiastically –– and when the friendly joust concludes, the stranger writes to thank Hirayama for his time, and Hirayama carefully folds the heirloom note into his janitor overalls.

The stranger’s bizarre attempt at human connection in a public toilet could have been all for naught. The note could have easily ended up in a landfill. But Hirayama, being one who draws back enough from any action to observe, reflect and reciprocate, manages to breathe life into a seemingly trivial gesture and bring quiet felicity to himself and the stranger. Someone’s trash is truly another man’s treasure.

Through the game, Wenders extols the simple joy that accompanies slow-movingness, building a vision of a world apathetic to winning, or conforming to the hypermodern desire for progression. I stress that it is a vision, for it is not reality in the Tokyo of Perfect Days. The other characters flit through their days preoccupied about prevailing in one way or another: fellow janitor Takashi daydreams about winning the girl of his dreams (but loses his grip on the world), and Hirayama’s estranged sister Keiko trails wealth and power (but her relationships with her loved ones are in disrepair).

These characters are embodiments of Tokyo’s hypermodernity, emblematised by the recurring images of the city’s Skytree (the world’s tallest tower), and the futuristic-looking public toilets that Hirayama cleans. It is worth noting that Wenders was commissioned by the Tokyo Toilet project to create a series of short films praising the ingenious creation of 17 unique public toilets redesigned for the Shibuya district. In a clever meta-cinematic inversion, the writer-director opted instead for a feature film spotlighting the humans behind the maintenance of such facilities. Rather than aping a touristic, rose-tinted view of Japan as poster-child for Architectural Digest, we get so much more from Wenders’ focus on the "little" things and the individuals behind them. It is the "little" men like Hirayama who grow the "little" real trees that provide shade amidst Tokyo's towering structures––quite literally, when we recall how he pockets a little sapling in a park, brings it home, and laboriously tends to it every morning before work. 

Indeed, Wenders seems to suggest that, perhaps, the playbook to living gracefully and respectably is to attentively come into the presence of oneself and others, appreciate the less winsome in life, and perform the little things right. To look at leaves and shadows of leaves in equal wonder. To polish a public toilet immaculately, even though it will be soiled again tomorrow.

In a world that demands our adulthood, that interpellates individuals as conquest-desiring fanatics, the unmarried, fast-aging, nature-lover in Hirayama chooses to meander through life, in his own time, at his own pace. Though there can never really be faultless days, Perfect Days demonstrates the innocuous perfection of living day-to-day this way: X to O, and O to imperfect X.

Film: Perfect Days (2023)

Director: Wim Wenders

Screenplay: Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki

Running Time: 2h 3m

Awards: Won Best Actor and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes Film Festival; Nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards

Catch it at The Projector while it’s still screening!

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Edited by Stephanie Jaina Chia and Nigel Goh