Kōji Yakusho plays Hirayama, a gentle soul employed as a toilet cleaner (a slightly more prestigious calling in Japan than elsewhere), whose daily routine allows him to compartmentalise the demands of work and the pleasures of the intellect, from listening to his old-school music cassettes and photographing sunlight through trees to reading before bed in a narrow pool of light (in Japanese, the idea of pleasurable fulfilment is called Ikigai). But Hirayama is clearly a man who has been emotionally bruised before, as becomes clear when he is contacted by his niece.

Wenders’ film is in tune with its protagonist in the leisurely pace it employs and the quiet contemplation of the humdrum, but you never feel bored or restless. Much of the success of the film reflects the pleasure that comes from dropping down a couple of gears to vicariously enjoy Hirayama’s life, while the tensions of the plot – an unreliable workmate, an ambivalent relationship with a restaurant owner, the legacy of family estrangement – turn out to be trivial in comparison to the joy of life itself.

“Perfect Days is, by no small margin, Wenders’s most successful narrative film in a long time. With its gentle rhythms, leisurely pacing and quiet profundity, this Tokyo toilet story has an obvious debt to the work of Yasujirō Ozu.” Wendy Ide, Observer.

“Perfect Days is his best and most winning fiction film since Wings of Desire (1987), both an example of late style evolving out of a return to first principles and, more simply, of Wenders adapting the documentary approach, which has rarely failed him, to a fictional subject.” Nick James, Sight and Sound.

“[L]ike the dappled sunlight that keeps catching Hirayama’s eye as it filters through the trees, it’s a tapestry of moments, each one flitting out of existence as soon as it arrives.” Robbie Collin, Telegraph.