The earliest extant Ozu film, and one of several satires on college life, Days of Youth is set partly at a ski resort, where two college roommates vie over the same girl and fail on two counts: to win her, and to pass the exams for which they have not studied. The film's comic touches-running gags involving a "Room to Let" sign used for meeting girls; socks, gloves, and even persimmons-are used in the service of an incredible narrative and visual symmetry. As Bordwell writes, "Days of Youth is clearly indebted to Japanese genres...(but) in many respects (it) is not a typical Japanese film. Its immediate debts are clearly to Lloyd and Lubitsch, and the structural rigor of the plot and style put it far closer to the Hollywood comedy of the mid-1920s...Already Ozu is considerably more fastidious and rigorous a filmmaker than most of his contemporaries."