Encounters between cultures have become a fraught matter in our era. Artists are supposed to avoid appropriation when they write about, paint, or otherwise engage with people of another race, ethnicity, or religious tradition, and to be wary to the point of anxiety about reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Audiences, for their part, are supposed to approach work from an unfamiliar context with an uncritical openness, the implication being that it is less important to evaluate or even understand the work than it is to celebrate the fact of diversity. Under such strictures, the scope of diversity too often narrows to the same kinds of affirmational stories and images dressed up in different native costumes. The politesse of the ideology of diversity can thus perversely make us more provincial rather than more genuinely cosmopolitan.

Yet the truth is that exploring a different culture with the aim of genuine understanding not only is enriching in itself, expanding the size of one’s imaginative world, but is an essential means to deepen one’s understanding of oneself and one’s own culture. Spend time in a foreign country, learn a foreign language, delve deeply into another civilization’s art and literature, and you realize not only the scope of human cultural variety but also the fact that, notwithstanding our common humanity, the variety is real, and not always superficial. And yet there are always enormous differences within, as well as between, cultures. Whether, in consequence, you newly appreciate your own difference or instead find yourself better reflected in a foreign glass than ever you saw yourself at home, you’ll have had an experience you could only have had by bringing your unfettered self to the table.

Two recent works of art, one a new film and the other a new play, restored my faith that such an unfettered encounter is still possible. They certainly made the case, albeit in very different ways, for its inestimable value.

The German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s love of Japan began cinematically, with a passion for the works of the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, whose film career straddled the transition from silent film to sound and from the era of Japanese militarism and war to postwar pacifism and alignment with America. Among Ozu’s cinematic signatures is stillness, the long take that observes the world, and a person in that world, without camera movement and often with minimal movement by the subject, which requires the audience to stop looking for something to happen and simply see. That effect is why Paul Schrader called Ozu one of the innovators of what he called the “transcendental style” in filmmaking. Wenders’s latest narrative film, Perfect Days, is a kind of tribute to his idol. But it is less a tribute in terms of style than a fictional biopic about a man who exemplifies in his life the virtues that Ozu achieved in his films, virtues that are frequently identified with Japan itself.

To summarize the story of Perfect Days is almost beside the point; this is not a film one watches for its plot. It is a character study of a solitary man, Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), who works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. But he is no ordinary toilet cleaner. Hirayama treats his janitorial job as a vocation, meticulously taking apart and cleaning the components of a bidet, using a mirror to look for dirt under and behind the bowl and tank, and remaining consistently scrupulous in his punctuality. In the first half of the film, he is paired with a young slacker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who cannot fathom why this older man takes such a low-status job so seriously. “Nine out of ten on the weirdness scale,” he says to his irritated girlfriend (Aoi Yamada), right in front of Hirayama’s face. Hirayama doesn’t react.

The toilets are no ordinary lavatories either. They were built to showcase Japanese artistry and engineering in advance of the Tokyo Olympic Games that were scheduled for 2020 and held in 2021, and each is a small wonder, stylish and modern but also integrated into the landscape and welcoming. Perfect Days originated, in fact, as a project to make a series of short films about these public facilities. They are a conscious national symbol, in other words, created by Japanese artists and financed by Koji Yanai, a senior executive and son of the founder of the clothing giant Fast Retailing, to represent Japan to the world.

Is Wenders engaged in a similar exercise? At first glance, it seems like he might be. Hirayama isn’t just meticulous about his job; he leads a life of rigorous and unvarying routine in which every element is treated with care. Every day, he wakes to the sound of an old woman sweeping the street, and smiles. He folds up his mattress to turn his bedroom into a living room, waters his collection of bonsai, trims his mustache, dons the company coveralls, and heads to his van, buying an iced coffee from a vending machine along the way. In his van, he listens to a carefully curated (and notably American-centric) library of music on cassette: Patti Smith, Lou Reed, the Animals, Nina Simone. (At one point, Takashi begs Hirayama to sell one of these cassettes—which hipster audiophiles have come to value—so Hirayama can lend him the money to take out his girlfriend, and cannot fathom why Hirayama resists doing so.) Every day at lunch Hirayama eats a sandwich in a small park and takes a snapshot with a vintage 1980s-era automatic film camera (without looking through the viewfinder) of the light through the trees, capturing the “komorebi,” the evanescent pattern of sunlight filtered through a forest canopy. In the evening in bed, he reads a book by William Faulkner or Patricia Highsmith before falling asleep.

There are slight variations in his routine across the week. Sometimes he has dinner in an underground restaurant where he is a regular; sometimes he goes to a bar where he has a quiet crush on the manager, Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa). Sometimes he goes to the local bathhouse to get clean and relax, soaking in the tub up to his nose. Once a week he drops off a roll of film to be developed, picks up the prints of the prior week’s roll, sorts through the snapshots for moments that look distinctive, and files these away in boxes that fill his closet, organized by date. 

It’s a portrait of a life in which every moment is devoted to some activity that is either socially necessary or worthwhile for its own sake, and a life in which those activities that are socially necessary—like using the lavatory—are treated as deserving the same attention to the aesthetic as any other part of life. As such, it could easily be taken as a statement about a philosophy of life, and something distinctively Japanese as such. But while the portrait is loving, I don’t think it’s simply laudatory. That collection of boxes is intended, I think, to be ominous, a reminder that all Hirayama is ultimately doing is collecting these moments to catalog and store. The days may be perfect, but what do they add up to as a life?

As the film proceeds, it becomes clearer that Hirayama isn’t just alone; he is deeply avoidant of any attachment. He will barely speak to his coworker, nor does he know what to say when the coworker’s girlfriend returns a purloined tape of his, and is overcome with emotion as she listens to a song from it with him. (The song is Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach,” a lament for the loss of a friend or lover to suicide.) A woman shares the park with Hirayama on his lunch break, but when they make eye contact he quickly pulls away in embarrassment. He cannot speak to Mama, of whom he clearly is fond, and when, near the end of the film, he catches her embracing a man, he flees. Later the man finds him, and reveals that he is her ex-husband and is dying of cancer. Hirayama handles this revelation by playing a game with the man: they jump in front of each other to see whether or not their shadows combine to make something darker. It succeeds at lightening the man’s mood, but it’s also an obviously symbolic action that reveals that Hirayama too is concerned with the potential intensity of his shadow.

It’s not that Hirayama is unfriendly or unkind. He helpfully assists a young boy who is stuck in the bathroom to find his mother, for example, and, in a lengthy segment in the latter half of the film, when his teenage niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) runs away from home and asks to stay with him, he graciously allows her to do so, ceding her his room while wedging himself between cabinets beside his sink downstairs to sleep. (The bonsai are allowed to keep their own room, perhaps because Hirayama doesn’t want to sleep next door to his niece so as to preserve their privacy, or perhaps because the bonsai themselves deserve privacy.) He also takes her on his rounds, including to the bathhouse (where they separate, he going to the men’s side, she to the women’s), and to his lunch spot. But while he’s not quite as silent with his niece as he is with his coworker, he still says very little, answering none of her questions about his relationship with her mother (or lack thereof).

Spending time with Hirayama seems to have a profound effect on Niko, notwithstanding or perhaps because of his distance. When, at lunch, he takes his daily picture of the light through the trees, Niko asks him if the tree is his friend. Hirayama seems surprised but pleased, and the idea that his best or only friend might be a tree seemed entirely fitting to me. In another scene, Niko and Hirayama are biking past a river and she asks him if they can go to the ocean. Hirayama puts her off by saying “next time,” and she, reasonably, asks when exactly that will be. He replies, “Next time is next time; now is now.” The phrase is clearly intended as a bit of wisdom, and she takes it in as such, but it’s a wisdom that underlines how Hirayama’s life is only a sequence of “now” moments, like his collection of snapshots.

The synecdoche within the film for Hirayama’s preferred relationship to other people is a game of tic-tac-toe that he plays with an unknown user of one of his lavatories. Hirayama finds a board scribbled on a slip of paper shoved into a crevice between two panels in the restroom, with one move taken. He initially tosses the paper in his trash bag, but then thinks better of it, fills in a move of his own, and places the slip back in its crevice. The next time he cleans the washroom, his pen pal has made a second move, and in this way over the course of days they complete the game, something which brings him evident delight—and the other player says the same in the sole comment written on the finished board. This kind of mediated relationship, conducted at a distance in a highly ritualized fashion, is what Hirayama is most comfortable with.

By the end of the film, the audience is given reason to believe that this need for distance is the reason that Hirayama has become a toilet cleaner in the first place. Hirayama’s sister, Keiko (Yumi Asô), finally comes to retrieve her daughter, and we get a glimpse of what might have cast a shadow over Hirayama’s life. But the shadow is only gestured at, not exposed to light. There was some kind of break with their father, whom Hirayama has not seen for many years, and who is now dying. Hirayama cannot bring himself to visit him, even though Keiko tells him that their father is no longer behaving as he once did, and that he has little time left. Keiko is clearly wealthy, which means that Hirayama is not a toilet cleaner out of financial necessity but because of the marginalization thereby imposed, because there is no other way he can live spiritually.

So this portrait of a monk-like toilet-cleaner living a life of nearly silent service is more ambivalent than it initially appears. Is it nonetheless also a portrait of Japan? It is being taken as such in some quarters, even promoted as such by both filmmakers and by the Japanese government. At the screening I attended last year at the New York Film Festival, Wenders’s Japanese cowriter, Takuma Takasaki, averred that he thought the film was more Japanese than he was. In spite of the fact that the film was cowritten and directed by someone who was neither born in nor lives in Japan, and who has no Japanese background, Japan promoted it last year as the country’s official candidate for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, for which it received a nomination.

It struck me, though, that Hirayama is in many ways as profoundly out of tune with contemporary Japan as he would be in America. After all, his coworker is both far more social than he is and baffled by Hirayama’s behavior and values. Nor is it an accident, I think, that Hirayama’s life is almost completely untouched by digital technology: he listens to old music on cassette tapes, reads books on paper, takes his pictures with an old film camera. As Ozu’s films were lovingly connected to a traditional Japan that was passing from the scene, Perfect Days depicts a man who apparently stopped engaging with the world sometime in the 1980s.

I suspect that’s partly a matter of Wenders’s own nostalgia, but not solely that. I do think Hirayama’s life is intended to be exemplary, but exemplary as a response to a particular difficulty of our time. It is not only in Japan that human beings are retreating further and further from human interaction, but our retreat is into a pseudo-social digital solitude that the resolutely analog Hirayama has abjured in favor of a methodical but nonsocial engagement with the real world. His snapshots are the opposite of selfies, not a presentation of himself to a world that isn’t really there but a presentation of the world to a solitary self that is. In that regard, I think that Perfect Days is speaking to all of us, and if it can do so more effectively in a Japanese accent then that is an excellent reason for Wenders to have told his story this way.

If Perfect Days resonates for us as well, that’s a further testament to the clarity a foreign mirror brings, that we can see ourselves better in it too. 

But more than anything Perfect Days seems to be a self-portrait of the artist. It’s no accident that Hirayama is a photographer; it’s a passion that not only occupies him in a key moment in his day but suffuses his dreams, which we see on screen every time he goes to sleep in flickering black and white. It is a cliché to say that photographers and filmmakers—and Wenders is both—spend so much of their life observing that they can no longer truly be a part of the life that they observe, but that doesn’t make it false. So I don’t think it’s surprising for Wenders’s toilet-cleaning symbol of Japan to be a photographer who methodically tries to freeze moments of light even as another person’s touch—as when his coworker’s girlfriend gives him a parting peck on the cheek—freezes him with alarm.

If Perfect Days is a portrait of the artist, then it represents a progression in Wenders’s own understanding of himself and his position. Nearly thirty years ago, in Wings of Desire, Wenders presented an angel in Berlin, fated to watch and listen to humanity, recording their desire and despair, unable to intervene, unable to connect, yet desperate to do so, who ultimately gives up his angelic status to become human. Hirayama is kind of like that angel, but one who is reconciled to the fact that he is fated to be an observer, and who has determined to find delight in perfecting his days alone.

That his sweet, sad story resonates powerfully in Japan, as it appears to have done, is a testament to what an outsider’s eye can add: by seeing himself in another culture, he can help that culture see itself. If it resonates for us as well, that’s a further testament to the clarity a foreign mirror brings, that we can see ourselves better in it too. 

In 1983, Arthur Miller traveled to Beijing to direct a production of his historic early play Death of a Salesman. The cast consisted of all local Chinese actors, led by Ying Ruocheng, a bilingual actor and artistic director of the theater where the production would be mounted, who had himself translated Miller’s play into Mandarin. The show was a diplomatic landmark, a sign of China’s new openness to the West and of a budding relationship with the United States. But it was a landmark in artistic terms, as well.

During the Cultural Revolution, both foreign theatrical influences and China’s own native theatrical traditions were crushed under the dancing boots of eight propagandistic pageants that were the only theater Madame Mao would permit. By the early 1980s, though, the winds of change were blowing. Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials, The Crucible, had been performed in a Mandarin adaptation in Shanghai in 1982 and was instantly understood by its audience as being analogous to its own experiences under the Gang of Four. But Death of a Salesman is a quintessentially American play, and the Chinese audience was almost totally unfamiliar with America. Could such a play make sense to a Chinese audience that, unaccustomed to modern theatrical norms, could not possibly understand how this play was traducing and critiquing them?

That’s the question that begins Miller’s memoir of the experience, Salesman in Beijing. It’s also a question at the heart of a new play, Salesman in China, about Miller’s production, which received its world premiere at this year’s Stratford Festival and is based substantially on both Miller’s book and Ying Ruocheng’s own memoir about his life in Chinese theater, both “behind bars and backstage,” as his book’s subtitle has it. The play, by the husband-and-wife team Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy (the latter of whom also directed), is an unqualified tour de force. But it is also, itself, a fascinating document of an encounter: with the past, with a foreign country, and with the past as a foreign country.

Salesman in China begins as Death of a Salesman does, with Willy Loman coming through the doorway with his bags. But instead of the lights coming up slowly on Willy’s home in Brooklyn as he sighs, “Oh boy, oh boy,” a young Chinese boy runs past, and with a rush of bicycles zipping down the aisles to distract the audience, the set is suddenly cleared, the lights go up with a bang, and we are in a rehearsal hall in Beijing, anticipating Arthur Miller’s imminent arrival. That wasn’t Willy, then, and this isn’t Death of a Salesman: the set and costumes for that show haven’t even been built. The Willy we saw was in the mind of Ying Ruocheng (played by the Singaporean star Adrian Pang), much as, in Miller’s play, we are often in Willy’s mind, moving fluidly between an imagined past and a poorly perceived present. There could hardly be a more economical or clearer way for Sy to have let the audience know what play, and what kind of play, they are in.

The most fundamental thing we learn from this opening, though, deeper than where and when we are and the intertextual nature of the undertaking, is whose play this is. It is Ying’s play, not Miller’s. This isn’t a story about Miller discovering China but a story about Ying discovering himself through Miller’s play, through an encounter with Loman.

As the play unfolds, it branches into an astonishingly dense canopy of themes and story strands. From stories they tell, laughingly, we learn about how Ying and the other actors suffered during the Cultural Revolution; some of his current colleagues were in prison with him or were sent with him for reeducation in the countryside, while others were his guards and persecutors, but that is all in the past. Their laughter is undercut, though, by scenes that interrupt the action that takes place in Ying’s memory: of Madame Mao’s propaganda opera dancing across the stage, of beatings and other indignities visited upon Ying and his fellow artists. In the present, we also see the impact of this past on Ying’s marriage. His wife, Wu Shiliang (Jo Chim), a former actress, abandoned the stage to become an informer for the Chinese Communist Party, and while she asserts her patriotic motives for this choice, it’s impossible for us to know whether that sentiment is authentic or just another mask she wears. Indeed, it may be impossible even for her husband to tell.

For Arthur Miller (Tom McCamus), these masks are a source of frustration and even evidence of betrayal. He cannot fathom Ying’s and so many others’ eagerness to put the past behind them; he expects access to their outrage as though it were his due as an artist. Masks are a literal artistic frustration, as well. He struggles with his actors’ preference for a more demonstrative, less interior style of acting, and with traditional wig-makers and makeup artists determined to present the Lomans in what Ying himself describes as masks, symbols of Westernness that only look grotesque to Miller (and, no doubt, to the audience). It isn’t until late in the play that Miller comes to understand that the monumental effort these artisans put into their craft was a token of their extraordinary esteem for him and for his work, or that Ying may be under political pressures that cannot be compared to those of an American writer in the 1950s facing the blacklist. But Miller’s real objection to the masks isn’t aesthetic or political. It goes to the heart of what he wants from theater, and from this production in particular: to shatter the separation between his Chinese actors and his Brooklynite characters, and thereby between his original American audience and his new Chinese audience.

The play, though, is smart enough to recognize that even these ambitions to connect ultimately return to an encounter with the self. Miller has come to China to reassure himself of his continued relevance. In his own country he’s a theatrical dinosaur, remembered more for having married Marilyn Monroe than for his art—or for his political stance against the House Un-American Activities Committee. But that’s external, not something that springs from the act of artistic creation itself. Zhu Lin (Phoebe Hu), his Linda, has him dead to rights in one of the play’s best rehearsal room moments, when he criticizes her performance in the scene where Linda tells her sons that their father may be planning to commit suicide, a moment where he finds her too slow and lachrymose. Zhu Lin notes that she gave a performance that to her felt authentically Chinese, and yet it reminded her director of the overacting Jewish mothers of the Yiddish theater. Miller, she concludes, is looking for something that will feel Chinese to him, which is to say that he’s looking to validate himself more than to open himself to the very encounter he seeks, even when it is happening right in front of him.

The most important encounter with the self, though, is Ying’s. From the beginning, he is haunted by the ghost of his father, the former head of a Catholic university who fled to Taiwan in 1949, and whom Ying refused to join partly out of patriotism and partly out of disgust for his father’s philandering. Death of a Salesman is so significant for Ying because when he first read it decades ago he thought he finally understood his father and his own relationship with him—which is to say, he identified with Biff. The intercultural element of this scene is fascinating; apparently no Chinese work gave him the insight into his simultaneous feelings of disillusionment with his once-idolized father and of a lingering, desperate desire for his father’s love and approval. But now he must play Willy, not Biff. He has his own son (presumably the young boy of the play’s opening), whom he perforce abandoned when he was imprisoned and from whom he is now estranged; his own spirit has been crushed by a soulless political system, his own dreams revealed to be chimerical; and he’s also lunging for a last chance that, as he is repeatedly warned by his wife among others, may be suicidal, at least in terms of his career. He can’t play Willy without facing all of that, which means giving up his original point of identification and forgiving his own father.

As I left the theater after my first time seeing the play, I was a little disappointed by this inward turn. I found myself musing about what that choice and many others said about its meaning for the playwrights themselves. How much of the play was about the actual China in 1983, the actual Ying and the actual Miller, and how much was about being theater artists in multicultural twenty-first-century Canada navigating the minefield of diversity? The Miller of the memoir is far more knowledgeable and more open than the Miller of the play, but this only feeds his magisterial self-confidence, his sense that he has come to China with something to give. The play brings him down to earth a bit, which seems to be a wise choice theatrically, but I couldn’t help thinking about what that says about the imagined audience. But of course, the China that once welcomed a play like Salesman in China no longer exists; for now, the era of opening has closed.

After seeing the play a second time, though, I opened myself up to an encounter of my own. I’ve long struggled with Death of a Salesman, with Linda’s fierce proclamation that “attention must be finally paid to such a person.” Why? I always wondered. Why must I be moved by the fact that Willy Loman has learned nothing over the entire play, that his response to the profound revelation of his son’s love is to descend even further into delusion, and ultimately to a pointless death? I identified with Biff as he is in the requiem, dismissing the father who died for him as never truly knowing himself; as he pulled away at Willy’s funeral, I found myself pulling away emotionally every time Miller’s play tried to pull me in. But through Ying, I better appreciated what Death of a Salesman could achieve, and what I had missed about the meaning of my own cramped reaction—that it might reflect something about my own ambivalent relationship to my father’s dreams and frustrations, and my own fears of becoming him—than I ever had by approaching the play directly.

There is so much else I could say about this extraordinary play. The sense of humor that pervades it is delightful, from the portrayal of the Stage Manager (Howard Dai), who used to be a Red Guard (and relishes his arbitrary authority equally in both roles), to the second-act opener where a Chinese busker (Derek Kwan, who also plays several other roles, including the older Chinese playwright Cao Yu and the wigmaker) successfully entertains a mostly English-speaking audience in rapid-fire and untranslated Mandarin. Speaking of translation, the artistry of the subtitles is especially impressive: the play is half in English and half in Mandarin—the bilingual characters sometimes change languages in the middle of a line—and both languages are translated in subtitles which are projected on a screen just below the stage. So as not to confuse the audience about who is talking, they appear under whichever character is speaking, which means the actors have to be very precise in their blocking.

But technical challenges never get in the way of this all-around extraordinary cast, whose members move fluidly between time periods, between the meta-theatrical layers of the play, and between acting styles without ever losing the emotional reality of the moment. That emotional reality, the thing Miller was so intent upon, is what will stay with me forever. Indeed, I cannot recall a better rendition of Linda’s final monologue than the one given by this young English-speaking Taiwanese–Canadian actress playing a middle-aged Mandarin-speaking Mainland Chinese actress, kneeling at the far right edge of the stage and facing an imaginary audience in the wings as Willy and the director hover behind the curtain waiting to hear whether that audience will applaud. Confronting this moment, I was moved to tears.

Isn’t that remarkable?