Sublime mundane, media that reset my brain

Perfect Days, Convenience Store Woman & Long Live the Post Horn: ways to not have a brat summer, unless you're a little sister

As a younger sibling, and especially as a younger sister: it’s been brat summer for 35 years, baby. The younger sibling secret is that if you’re lucky, about 30%-40% of your personality is generously gifted by more interesting siblings. My older brother constantly recommends things, and it’s my responsibility to roll my eyes and say “sure, maybe one day.” When I eventually follow through, and he’s inevitably correct, he’s very gracious.¹

My brother recommended the movie Perfect Days to me months ago, and I ignored him, naturally. Then I watched it and had the experience that I’m often looking for in books, film, and art, but that is so hard to find: a momentary brain reset. A brief, fleeting peace with the eternal present.

Wim Wenders’ film is about the day-to-day life of a public washroom cleaner in Tokyo. Based on the premise, I was afraid it would be a celebration of the beautiful nobility of work ethic. Luckily, it is not! Without detailing too much, it’s about the possibility of the sublime in the mundane; what it means to choose repetition, even though change is constantly looming around the corner.

There’s a moment in the movie when Hirayama, the protagonist, comes across a construction site, and a stranger comments on what he remembers being there before. Hirayama exists in a staunch daily and weekly routine, but we can assume this construction site is of no particular note to him. Living in any city is full of moments like this: change is relative to your experience. Everything in your life can feel completely stagnant, and then you turn a corner and there’s a massive hole where there was a building where you once made memories inside. But to most passers-by, it’s just a hole.

The movie celebrates how much beauty is possible in every square inch when we focus and pay attention, even if we aren’t Hirayama. Any further interpretation (and I have many thoughts!) would risk telling too much!

It’s a movie I recommend watching if you feel like you need a brain reset. It’s eminently watchable; a decent amount “happens” in a movie with very little plot momentum. It also has one of the most moving acting performances in my recent memory. The final moments are a long shot of the actor’s face with the emotional impact of a semitruck.

Komorebi, 2002-2004 from Ichigo Sugawara

My brother originally recommended it when I was looking for a movie on a bad day, as something to watch when feeling anxious. As is often the case – don’t tell him this ⁽ᵇʳᵃᵗ ˢᵘᵐᵐᵉʳ⁾– he was right.

To temporarily stave off the younger sister energy permanently fomenting in my heart, I’m passing it forward. Here are two books that made me feel the same way: books that use the mundane to leave you feeling the tiniest bit like your brain was rewired to better withstand being alive despite the device in your hand providing a constant feed of suffering and also somehow tasks to complete. The feeling never lasts, but I’m always chasing it.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Like Perfect Days, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is set in Tokyo and depicts a woman named Keiko who just wants to keep working in a convenience store. The regimented order of the store provides a way for her to understand the world and her place in it.

If I can level any criticism at Perfect Days, I’d say that it acknowledges ever-churning societal demands, but is not interested in its bite. It seems relevant that a variant of this story — choosing “menial” labour — by a Japanese author spends much more time on the social consequences of doing so. The demands of conformity, capitalism, and personal development are the main plot drivers of the novel.

It starkly depicts otherness, without a treacly message about “being yourself.” Staying true to your desires is easy when those desires line up with normative expectations — jobs with upward mobility, a legible family unit. In other versions of this story² everyone on page joins the reader in the realization that other versions of selfhood are possible. In Convenience Store Woman, which feels truer to life, the characters are mostly baffled by Keiko’s desire to eschew change and to remain in the brightly lit, perfectly orderly world of the convenience store.

The symbol of the Norwegian Postal Service: a post horn. Incidentally, I read this novel on vacation in Switzerland which has a post horn on all their buses—helpful in recognizing the symbol to me, a Canadian

Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth

The title of Long Live the Post Horn is from a Kierkegaard passage which also appears in the novel’s epigraph. If you're like me, you read it and think, ah, a metaphor, soon I will learn what the post horn symbolizes. But no! This is a novel about mail.

Or, a little more specifically, this is a novel that uses postal regulations to talk about the absurdity of free will. Capital A absurdity: how daunting it is to be presented with choices, even in the close confines of modern life. The novel opens with the main character, Ellinor, discovering an old diary and feeling completely detached and confused by it: “I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I'.” And had anything changed, had growing older made any difference?“

Over the course of the book, she awakens from this fog. Seemingly minor bureaucracy leads to affirmation:

Might life be a serious business that required something of you, a daunting enterprise? The thought, however, wasn’t oppressive but liberating because it’s good to have a purpose, to be given a purpose, it’s a declaration of trust because you don’t entrust a task to someone you don’t respect.

Unlike Perfect Days and Convenience Store Woman, whose protagonists want to avoid change at any cost, this is a novel about transformation through a similar banality as the other two. The successes and failures in all of these stories do not make headlines. It’s all very small; they hand you a magnifying glass to take to look at the minutia around you, in corners of public life you might breeze by (public toilets, convenience stores, post offices).

In my non-reading life, I joke a lot about ‘surrendering to the eternal now,’ as someone who mostly fails to do so. I’m a committed multi-tasker and journaler: the present is difficult to access. That joke, about the eternal now, mostly comes up in moments of minor, surmountable misery: going camping and discovering our tent is not water-proof anymore, there is only the eternal present when you’re waiting for the rain to be over. One of my most strongly held beliefs is that waiting for the bus is morally and psychologically good for you. There is no greater Eternal Now than public transit — you are truly along for the ride.

These books, to me, created the small zaps of a brain reset that I can only assume is the point of self-help books. I love books that take big swings to capture something vast and ambitious — but occasionally you need to read something with a tight focus on something simple. As a committed hater (or, see earlier: kind of a brat) I can promise that none of these three stories can be distilled down to “feel good” stories about the beauty of life — the world is too messy. But all of them reminded me of lessons that should be easy enough on the surface, except that everything in my day-to-day life distracts me from them, namely: logging off and paying attention.

(Except for my brother’s recommendations. Those I have to dismiss for a few months at a time: it’s little sister summer forever.)³

1. When the situations are reversed, and he takes one of my recommendations, I typically respond with something like “SEEE? i told you so!!!” Eternal brat summer.

2. I’m thinking in particular about Sweet Bean Paste, a much sweeter novel about the pressures of conformity in a society that measures individuals based on their usefulness … and which reminded me that I need a streak of cold, dark cynicism to enjoy a story about being True 2 You, lest I get a toothache.

3. Ryan: please ignore this, thanks!