‘Perfect Days’ asks, what constitutes a happy life?

“Perfect Days” is about a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo for a living. For the first half hour or so, we follow him as he wakes up at dawn in his small, spartan apartment. He suits up, mists his plants, trims his mustache, sips coffee, and drives his equipment truck into the city. There, with uncomplaining efficiency, he wordlessly goes about his business.

Don’t let this description put you off. It’s a wonderful movie, and an Oscar nominee for best international feature. It is also proof, if any were needed, that the rhythms of everyday life, no matter how seemingly mundane, can resonate when beheld by an artist’s eye.

The artist here is the German-born Wim Wenders, who also co-wrote the script with Takuma Takasaki. It’s Wenders’ first dramatic feature in Japanese after making several documentaries in Japan, including a terrific one on the great director Yasujirō Ozu. At its best, “Perfect Days” shares the same haunting sense of stillness that characterized Wenders’ best work in films such as “The American Friend” and “Wings of Desire.”

Hirayama the cleaner (Kôji Yakusho, the marvelous actor best known for “Shall We Dance?”) leads a methodical, almost ritualistic existence. That morning routine of his is always the same. His drive into the city is always accompanied by cassette tapes of Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, and The Animals. (That group’s “House of the Rising Sun” is a particular favorite.) He listens contentedly but doesn’t sing along.

During lunch breaks, he sits in a local park and takes photos of the trees and the blue sky. After work, he visits a local sauna and then usually stops at a favorite diner. Occasionally he checks out a bookstore, where he buys novels by William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith for a dollar. He reads them at night, lying down, by lamplight.

What has led Hirayama, a man of obvious culture and smarts, to such a spare life? Wenders doesn’t attempt to fill in the blanks for us. Hirayama is not presented as a clinical case or a puzzle to be solved. If we were expecting a startling revelation about some great hurt in his past, it never comes. Still, there are hints. His playful teenage niece, Niko, (Arisa Nakano), whom he has not seen for some time, unexpectedly comes to stay with him after a spat with her mother, Keiko, (Yumi Asô), Hirayama’s estranged sister.

Niko, who accompanies her uncle on his rounds, wants to know why he and her mother don’t get along. His only answer is that they live in different worlds. When Keiko shows up to retrieve her daughter, there is no rancor. We see her sadness at her brother’s life, but also the love they still furtively bear for each other.

Should she be sad for him? She does not see Hirayama as we do. He is living a life that offers up its small serenities. He takes great pleasure in photographing the beauty of the trees and the sky. People are drawn to him – Niko, a lost child in the park, the bookseller, a transient homeless man. Hirayama’s jabbery young cleaning assistant, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), asks him how he can be so devoted to such a job. Takashi is flabbergasted, and somewhat awed, by Hirayama’s equipoise. 

As portrayed with unstinting dignity by Yakusho, Hirayama defies our easy assumptions about what constitutes a happy life. When he and Niko are out riding bicycles, his unruffled repose inspires her. He wants her to live in the moment. “Next time is next time. Now is now,” he says to her, and she turns his words into a jingle that they both joyfully join in on. 

There is no catharsis to this story, no dramatic denouement. Hirayama’s unknowability represents the mystery of what people truly carry inside themselves. If he remains an enigma, he is an enigma touched by grace. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Perfect Days” is rated PG for some language, partial nudity, and smoking.