This study examines Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) in dialogue with his documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985). The latter, I argue, visually reifies Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs. Barthes abstracts "Japan" from socio-historical context, as a fictional realm governed by signifier to resist Western logocentrism. Yet under Wenders’ romantic lens, life in Tokyo appears to realistically offer a utopian mode of experience based on pure form without meaning. In Perfect Days, however, when the mode of formal enjoyment is woven into the lived experience of a local subject, its fragility becomes apparent. The protagonist Hirayama’s pursuit of form is not rootless, but stems from evading his traumatic past; his pleasure derives less from the surface of experience than from distance to fixed narratives, offering imaginative space while avoiding pain. In this sense, Hirayama’s formal enjoyment is not self-sufficient, but a residual structure after meaning is suppressed, which reveals the underlying socio-historical impetus of Barthes’ mythic "Japan". Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, this study further examines how Hirayama's life, though seemingly detached from the circuits of neoliberal capitalism through immersing in pre-digital activities, supports its operation. Hirayama’s highly ordered, introverted life does not embody Agamban’s autonomous "form-of-life", not subordinated to biological life or standardized role; rather, it erases his social presence and brings him closer to the marginalized "bare life". His hermit life, though appealing, risk aligning with the control society under neoliberalism, in which the subject is voluntarily exploited as human capital.

Authors:
Bowei Tang, Waseda University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Bowei Tang is currently an independent researcher. His research interests include postwar Japanese cinema and contemporary Japanese independent cinema.

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