A great deal happens in [Early Spring], not much of it very remarkable. Of course, the cinema simply cannot avoid a level of detail unattainable in the most painstakingly naturalistic literature. However, the 'suspense' of the main plot of Early Spring, the marital and career problems of Sugiyama and his wife, is reduced not just by an accumulation of details but by the linking of these details across the text into a mass of minor chains of implication…. There is the same calculated casualness in the way important information about the characters, such as the death of the Sugiyamas' child, is introduced late and in fragments—even Masako's name is not mentioned until halfway through the film…. Early Spring is, perhaps surprisingly, considering Ozu's austere reputation, a very ideological film. The advantages and disadvantages of the statuses of 'salaryman', manual worker (tinker, electrician), and independent shop-owner are exhaustively...