Tags: blog, film, drama, essential, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday January 04th, 2026
Next time is next time.
The first thing that Hirayama does when he steps out of his front door of a morning is look up. Every day, without fail.
He spends quite a lot of time looking upwards. Often, it's just a glance. Sometimes, like when he's is the park, surrounded by trees, he'll take the time to drink in the sky as he tilts his head back to drink his carton of milk.
He takes pictures of the leafs of the trees as the sunlight dapples through them.
What is he looking for, exactly? It's never explained.
It's a curious habit for someone who spends most of their time looking down to care for things. Hirayama works as a toilet cleaner, meticulously and methodically caring for the state of Tokyo's public toilets. And in his spare time he likes to find tiny saplings growing in inhospitable places and care for them in his small scale arboretum in his front room.
He seems happy and contented in his deliberately simple, small scale, human scale routines, all contrasted against the huge Tokyo sprawl and the colossal Skytree tower. And we're happy following those routines, following the satisfaction taken in a job well done. But why is a man who is clearly a dreamer and a thinker, whose natural instinct is to look up, looking down at toilet floors?
Why is a man who clearly cares for little things, not just for their intrinsic value, but for the value they bring to everyone around them, not caring for bigger things? Like whole people, loved ones or dear friends?
We get a hint of something in the background when his niece turns up unannounced. He doesn't break his routines though, he just lets her tag along and for a brief time he gets to care for her as well. It doesn't last for long before he gets his unaccompanied life back but not before we see something he may have lost. And may even be hiding from.
Before the film ends, he's given one more hint of a possibility of something more, something outside of his routines.
How does he feel about it?
We don't know. In an extraordinary scene we get to see all his emotions fully let go, but without an explanation as to what those emotions are.
This is a film that explains nothing. It asks so many questions but always expects you to come up with your own thoughts. This should be infuriating but the deep love it shows to its subjects, not just Hirayama but the entire world he inhabits, draws you in and captivates you.
If I were to list all the delightful small details in this film, this review would take as long as the film itself. And whatever conclusions you draw from them will be your own.
Many thanks to vga256, the creator of the kiki software this blog runs on, for recommending this film to me.