City of Many Worlds

A young woman arrives unannounced at the unresponsive door of a Tokyo apartment belonging to an older relative. She sits down outside and waits. Like the girl herself, the viewer is unsure of her welcome. We know the apartment’s inhabitant to be solitary, taciturn, a person who struggles to communicate and make connections with others. How will she be received? And how will this development impact the protagonists as we follow them through a slice of their lives in Japan’s largest city? These are the identical plot points of two recent films that share a setting but in many other respects could not be more different. To explore how depictions of the lived experience of a range of city spaces are used to drive plot and develop characterization, I use the architectural concept of “habitation” to think beyond buildings and characters’ relationships to those structures, analyzing instead how inhabited spaces incite plot developments and bring characters together, in a trope that I call “habitation as storytelling device.”Writing about cinema, both academic and popular, has often drawn attention to how mise-en-scène, location, and set design have been used to communicate characters’ inner states. Working with the terms dwelling, habitation, and inhabitation, Guiliana Bruno has explored how the architecture of the cities that film characters move through can express their inner psychologies.1 Building on this pathbreaking work, I propose that applying architecture scholar Oliver Heckmann’s concept of “habitation” to film analysis can expand this line of inquiry to reveal how architecture not only communicates characterization, but also can actively shape both character and plot. Habitation as a storytelling device not only uses buildings and interior design to tell viewers about characters’ psychologies, but also weaves narratives directly from the built environment. Characters change their environments, and are also changed by them, as the relationship between inhabitant and habitation space takes center stage.Two recent films invite us to look at how habitation spaces prompt characters to behave in new ways, building relations and networks with other people in and through those spaces. Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), about the professional and personal life of a public-toilet cleaner, and Chihara Tetsuya’s Aisu kurīmu netsu (Ice Cream Fever, 2023), about the role of an ice-cream shop in four women’s lives, do not simply trace their characters through the architecture of contemporary Tokyo. Their stories would not exist without those architectural spaces. From designer toilets to bathhouses, and trendy apartments to more-traditional abodes, both films are built around habitation—the interaction of dwelling space, lived experience, and enacted behavior. Inhabiting the specific apartments featured in both films actively changes the characters as they grapple with sharing once-solitary spaces. Habitation behaviors such as choosing to use a public bathhouse instead of a private bathroom, or working as a toilet cleaner, prompt the characters to make decisions about how to live their lives. If representations of “dwelling” spaces on film represent characters’ already-existing inner psychologies, then habitation, by contrast, precipitates new plotlines by creating an active relationship between inhabited space and inhabitant.By insisting on the materiality of the architecture surrounding the characters, both films consistently emphasize the analog aspects of bodies in spaces in an increasingly digital culture, recalling Bruno’s argument that “film/body/architecture” is “a haptic dynamics.”2 Wenders’s and Chihara’s characters are in constant physical contact with their environments, touching toilets, baths, and café counters while cleaning, jumping to hit a spot above a doorframe, or caressing a tree in a park. The more the characters touch their habitation spaces, the more we become aware of the lack of human touch in their lives: all the protagonists suffer from loneliness and frustrated desire, and yet all keep other characters at a distance until the shared spaces that they inhabit force them into contact.By organizing characters’ lives around habitual visits to bathhouses and jobs as toilet cleaners and ice-cream sellers, Perfect Days and Ice Cream Fever dwell on the most banal aspects of embodied experience, while surrounding the characters with ephemeral digital content in Instagram feeds and references to Spotify. Ice Cream Fever brings characters together through the consumption of ice cream, while Perfect Days introduces characters at the opposite end of this process as they visit the Tokyo Toilet Company’s designer facilities. Yet the emphasis on bodily processes is a reminder to pay attention to the embodied experiences of the characters, and to observe how they change their habitation environments as, at the same time, those spaces also change them.Perfect Days follows sixty-something Hirayama (Yakusho Kōji) through his daily routine as he wakes early in a sparsely furnished apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Kōtō Ward and drives to trendy Shibuya to clean designer toilets, before relaxing in the old shitamachi (“low town” or lower class) district of Asakusa. The arrival of Hirayama’s niece Niko (Nakano Arisa) threatens to disrupt this established pattern. Yet Niko’s strategy for achieving a better understanding of the rift between her mother and her uncle lies in assimilating into Hirayama’s life and work; sleeping in his room, sharing his lunch, attempting to help clean the Shibuya toilets, and ending the day at his favorite bathhouse.Ice Cream Fever introduces two pairs of female protagonists connected by a stylish modern apartment in the yamanote (“mountain side” or upper class) area of western Tokyo. In one storyline, Natsumi (Yoshioka Riho), a young graphic designer working in an ice-cream parlor, attempts to make a romantic connection with Saho (Serena Motola), a from In a through the arrives to her and only the film between the two the viewer to that Saho and are of the same and that takes before The to the two is in the plot points of and Niko attempts to Hirayama by his and takes a in a for her through the stylish and of for a who is to be as as his constant of the is takes her to her favorite a that she as two films share a plot device and location, they in many an established uses a to his in of of Tokyo. 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