Hirayama is a middle-aged man employed as a toilet cleaner, who drives around serenely from job to job in his van, listening to music. At each location, he changes into a jumpsuit and matter-of-factly gets on with the job in hand with his brushes and mop. On his lunch-hour he reads and takes photos of trees and smiles acceptingly at everything that presents itself to his senses. But who is Hirayama? A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveal more of his past.
"Repetition as such, if you live it as repetition, you become the victim of it. If you manage to live it in the moment, as if you’ve never done it before, it becomes a whole different thing. Crafts in Japan have a whole different tradition and are still lived in a different way than crafts in our Western culture, in which crafts are disappearing rapidly, dramatically. It’s really a shame." (Wim Wenders)