A wry portrait of petit bourgeois family life in Tokyo, directed by Gosho, who was an early master of the shomin-geki or middle-class drama, a genre later developed by Naruse and Ozu. “If ever the ideology of ‘slice of life' were realized in cinema, it is in such films as this,” writes Noel Burch in To the Distant Observer. An office worker nearing retirement still dedicates himself to his work for the sake of his grown children; when he finally marries off his third daughter, he and his wife realize that they have forgotten to think of the future of their youngest son, an unwanted child who knows it. The film, as John Gillett (British Film Institute) notes, is “imbued with a naturalistic tone and ‘lived in' visual texture quite beyond American and European cinema of the time.” David Owens (Japan Film Center) adds: “As is typical of the best Japanese directors, Gosho concentrates on developing characters rather than plot. Each of the family members is carefully drawn and each grows before us as an individual, surpassing the sort of character typing that was usual for family melodramas.”