Chishu Ryu, who appears in minor roles in almost all of Ozu's earlier films, took his place in the later films as the director's "persona," with Setsuko Hara perhaps the feminine counterpart. In Late Spring, a widowed father believes that his daughter spurns marriage in order to remain with him. He allows her to think that he plans to remarry, though he has no intention of doing so, and she finally accepts an offer of marriage herself. Their farewell trip to Kyoto must be numbered among Ozu's most moving sequences, and the film itself, among his most beloved and subtly disturbing in portraying the cosmic trap that is love. In Ozu's universe, the hint of a smile on Ryu's face as he hears the bell of the shoji door (his daughter, as always) opens the viewer to the full emotional force of the narrative machinations just set in motion. Donald Richie is not alone in considering Late Spring "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in the Japanese cinema." Nathaniel Dorsky observes, "The final cut from the father 'unravelling' the apple to the ocean waves evaporates into space all that we thought solid. Cinema itself becomes our death and puts into perspective even our most tender sense of life."