After 《Perfect Days》, one camera stays with you for a strangely long time.

Wim Wenders's 《Perfect Days》 (2023). Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), who cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives a life with almost nothing digital in it. He listens to music on cassette tapes, reads paperbacks before bed, and at lunchtime always sits on the same park bench and picks up his camera. That camera is an Olympus Mju. Yakusho won Best Actor at Cannes in 2023 for playing this quiet man.

One Mju Is Enough

Hirayama, in his The Tokyo Toilet work uniform, looks down at the Olympus Mju in his hand.
Hirayama's Olympus μ[mju:]. The lens reads "OLYMPUS 35mm 1:3.5." Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

Hirayama's Mju is nothing fancy. A small compact film camera that fits in your palm. One 35mm prime at f3.5. Slide the cover open and it turns on; point it roughly and press, and you have a picture. No fussing over aperture or shutter. The film picked this camera for exactly that simplicity. With no settings to tie you down, you can focus only on the light in front of you. Every day, this man proves that good photographs don't come from gear.

Komorebi: Today's Light Is Only for Today

The closing title card explaining komorebi. Black-and-white light leaking through leaves.
The words that appear as the film ends: "Komorebi exists only in that moment, and never comes again." Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

What he photographs is always the same thing. Komorebi (木漏れ日): sunlight leaking through the leaves of trees, and the trembling shadows it makes. The fact that Japanese has a separate word for this already feels very much like this film. The fun part is that even though he shoots under the same tree from the same bench every day, no two pictures are alike. The wind is different, the clouds are different, the angle of the leaves is different. Komorebi exists only in that moment and never comes again.

A black-and-white komorebi photograph taken by Hirayama. Leaf veins and light held in rough grain.
Hirayama's black-and-white komorebi. Rough grain and deep shadows hold on to the air of that day. Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

That's why it's film. A medium where you don't shoot and delete endlessly, but spend each frame carefully. Light that never comes twice suits a method that never repeats either. Shooting in black and white probably wasn't an accident. Take the color away and only light and shadow remain. Just the essence of komorebi.

Waiting on the Lab

Hirayama holds the Olympus Mju to his eye and presses the shutter, aiming at a tree.
The lunchtime ritual. He looks through the viewfinder, takes one frame, then goes back to his lunch. Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

With digital, you'd check the screen on the back right after shooting, and that's it. Hirayama doesn't. He drops off his finished roll at the neighborhood photo shop, loads a fresh one, and a few days later goes back to pick up the prints. There's time between the moment of shooting and the moment of seeing. The waiting is part of his photography too, right down to the final sorting, when he keeps only the good ones and stacks them neatly in a box. That carries a different weight from images piling up in a folder.

Next Time Is Next Time, Now Is Now

His niece Niko raises a smartphone to photograph the light in the trees, while Hirayama watches beside her.
Niko with a smartphone, Hirayama with film. Two generations capturing the same light in different ways. Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

There's a line in the film: "Next time is next time. Now is now." Hirayama says it to his niece. His photographs are exactly like that. He isn't hunting for the one perfect frame. He catches today's light today, and tomorrow he'll catch tomorrow's. The diligence of sitting in the same spot every day, and the willingness to accept a slightly different result every day. Anyone who has shot film for a long time will know this rhythm.

Hirayama and his niece Niko sit side by side on a park bench, looking up at the trees and smiling.
Same bench, same tree, two people looking up side by side. Maybe photography is, in the end, about looking up together. Image ⓒ 《Perfect Days》 · Source: Naver Movies, TMDB

Somewhere in here is why we can't let go of film, either. In an age of shooting fast and deleting fast, you wind a roll sparingly and take a good look at the day. Hirayama's Mju stays with you because, in the end, it isn't a story about a camera. It's a story about how you treat a day. Next lunch break, try looking up once.