The scriptwriting team of director Kon Ichikawa and his wife, Natto Wada, has produced some of the most pungent social satire in Japanese cinema, and this film is one of their most widely hailed efforts. The hero is a young Japanese Everyman who graduates from a university along with millions of others and quickly faces the grim realities of the workaday world. His exaggerated miseries draw bitter laughter, but behind it are the growing pains of postwar Japan.