Loving Small Rooms

Our cities are heaving and continuously getting bigger. Around the world, cities continue to be magnets of desire, with ever-growing numbers of people flocking to them with dreams of finding better lives for themselves and their families. 

Many make this work and find in cities the fulfillment of what they sought. Many others do not. Woven into the stories of these urban dwellers—perhaps even in the most successful of these—are varying combinations of isolating dislocation, receding hopes, and most of all, frenetic competition with other city dwellers, for jobs, salaries, foodstuffs, dwellings, even toilet paper. 

To manage and leverage the clamor to get an edge over another, offerings of all of these have gotten smaller over time, manifested most starkly in the decrease in physical spaces for habitation and commerce, whether it be in the form of the tiny house movement, shared spaces, or even cage apartments. This has had the twofold effect of increasing the number of walls between inhabitants, as well as increasing the number of inhabitants within each set of walls (and, with that, one’s proximity to another). The presumption, it seems, is that increasingly small spaces will intensify the drive towards competition, but with this too comes a greater angst for urban living. 

The three artefacts below, Netflix’s dramatic adaptation of Yarō Abe’s Midnight Diner, Wim Wender’s Perfect Days, and Robert Zemeckis’s Here, suggest that angst need not be inevitable. Each takes the angst over the ever-increasing confinement of modern life seriously, but also finds in this reality a capacity, often unseen and unrecognized, for these diminutive spaces to reorder our desires from one of self-serving contest to one of other-centred receptivity.

Smallness creates spaces of open receptivity within the competitive self-enclosure of our seemingly vast urban places.

Midnight Diner’s eponymous restaurant is located down a tiny alley in Tokyo’s glitzy Shinjuku district. It is open from midnight to seven and seats no more than a handful of diners. The diners it does receive—office workers, aged drag queens, aspiring artists, retired porn stars, washed out gamblers—enter at the wee hours, each bearing the scars of the blows dealt by the big city and its inhabitants. In the diner’s tiny space, every customer faces the proprietor and without fail calls him “Master.” But each dish the master serves is not only nourishment. As in a confessional, the dish is made to tell a story about the customer who requests it, a story that has, at its heart, the frustration of the customer’s desire by the big city. A seemingly insignificant bowl of butter rice, or a quirky serve of noodle-less noodle soup, will often either remind the diner of happier times, unlock a longed-for state, or symbolize bonds of fidelity that open a broader horizon of desires that the city frustrates and threatens to keep shut away. Every so often, those frustrations ricochet out between the customers, threatening to turn the little community of diners into yet another extension of the combat in the city. Only there is physically no space for the conflict to spill into; indeed, the space is transformed by the diners’ deference to the master, for whom a simple act of pouring a glass of water on the combatants’ heads is enough to defuse the situation. What becomes apparent with each episode is the unwritten rule that recognizes that the space they occupy is not theirs to control. This realization engenders a posture of lightness and with that, a posture of receptivity across a bizarre diversity of demographics and subcultures, all of which would have been vying for survival with each other before entering the diner. 

Perfect Days brings a city’s small places into even sharper relief with Tokyo’s public toilets playing the central role as the workplace for the film’s protagonist, known only as Hirayama. Indeed, every facet of Hirayama’s highly routinized day is punctuated by smallness, whether in his living quarters, workplace, watering holes, or the van he drives. Yet, it is the smallness of each physical place that belies the breadth and depth of Hirayama’s lifeworld. He has an intense biophilia, with Wenders here playing with the Japanese concept of komorebi, or the interplay of leaves and sunlight, as paradoxically hinting at the love of the transient and the eternal, the dappled shimmer behind the leaves of the Japanese maples before which Hirayama sits in awe outdoors, and waters with tender care indoors. In a subtle nod to Shinto, viewers can sense an almost sacramental resonance in the plant life, making small spaces seem like thresholds to spiritual vastness. Similarly, Hirayama’s cultural world occasionally bursts through the confines of his humble workplace. He avidly reads William Faulkner, Aya Kōda, and Patricia Highsmith, and he collects cassettes of sixties and seventies rock and soul, which he listens to in his van. Even his dreams, which bookend the structure of his days, appear like the flickering films of yesteryear. This contrast between smallness and vastness becomes sharpened by the people who inveigh upon Hirayama’s diminutive life. Though on the surface they appear to enjoy the successes of the big city, they also bring to him—like the diners of Midnight Diner—the outer chaos and inner turmoil of their lives to what they regard as an island of personal stability, the fruit of his attunement to the insignificant things in the world. What that means, however, is that the chaos of the seemingly significant things of the world bears down on Hirayama like a cross on Christ, and a Christian viewer is able to sense this burden as he carries it through his perfectly structured days.

Here also plays on the contrast between smallness and vastness, only now in the blank vastness of suburbia. The interplay is between the smallness of a place with the vastness of time, focused on a single American suburban living room over more than two-hundred years. As with the previous two artefacts, the space is the receiving concierge of many lives—some famous, others momentous, others unremarkable—weaving in and out of each other over the centuries. Holding the tapestry together are Richard and Margaret Young, whose lives as a couple blossom, unravel, and then collapse in that living room. Despite the breaks in their love, the cramped living room almost acts as a cast keeping their hearts and, despite themselves, their love bound together. As with Perfect Days, the urban combat that created suburbia seeps through the walls and sets the inhabitants against each other. As with Midnight Diner, that these burdens are borne in the confines of a small room makes that bearing a purification of love, sifting through the dizzying procession of lives, loves, and passions that come and go over the centuries within that little space. Every act of fleeting passion for these passing things which come from all these myriad lives is the thread of a tapestry that unveils the abiding love of a single life, a love that endures right through to the very end. 

In each artefact, the harsh pressures of the urban and suburban order seem to become occasions of a reordering of desire. In that reordering, we see shifts from combat to community, from disintegration to depth, and from the cosmic to the concrete. What comes out from each of these artefacts is a paradox, that smallness creates spaces of open receptivity within the competitive self-enclosure of our seemingly vast urban places. Such redemptive irruptions within the infrastructure’s otherwise threatening liquidation of places are dependent on ensuring that persons cultivate the capacity in turn to notice and build opportunities for continuing communal fidelity within and to the ordered, deeper space that remains.

Matthew John Paul Tan is Dean of Studies at Vianney College, the seminary of the Diocese of Wagga Wagga in Australia. He also serves as Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia and Honorary Associate of Alphacrucis University College. He is the author of three books, his most recent being: A Theological Engagement with Pornography (Routledge 2026). He also blogs at Awkward Asian Theologian and is co-host of the podcast Awkward Asian Theologians.