In Early Spring he returns to an earlier milieu-that of the office worker-to "show the life of a man with such a job...his hopes for the future gradually dissolving, his realizing that...he has accomplished nothing....(I hoped) that the audience would feel the sadness of this kind of life" (Ozu). The disaffected hero finds a pleasant diversion in a young woman nicknamed Goldfish, leading to marital complications, a split and a renewal. "A great, unpleasant film with some of the most poetic and mysterious montage in Ozu's career. The sequence of cuts showing commuters arriving at the station in the early morning, and the cut, later on, in the midst of dramatic crises to a neon sign at twilight are of a profoundness found nowhere else in cinema." (Nathaniel Dorsky)