It's a little family shop in a changing Tokyo. The parents are too old to run it, so it falls on their unmarried daughter and widowed daughter-in-law. They have given up some land so a daughter and her husband can build an apartment building; another daughter returns from Kyushu with her husband and seem to move in permanently; a lost son turns up; a grandson despairs of passing his high school entrance exam; and there's talk that the land will be expropriated to build a highway.
Mikio Naruse's movie -- with Hideko Takamine as the widowed daughter-in-law -- starts out with an Ozu-like story, that soon bursts its bounds. The subplots are too numerous, the characters too selfish and poor, and the outside world keeps intruding with customers coming by and the telephone ringing, for Ozu's calm world, where all problems are soluble and all endings are happy. I watched for for more than half its length before I could figure out what was going on, what the story was about, even with Miss Takamine in the top-billed role. She seems, for the first half, to have no real issues beyond gently urging her son to study hard, and helping her mother-in-law do the housework. By the ending, all that had changed.
Naruse's works that seem to comment on Ozu always seem to be asking questions beyond watching the gentle prodding of a daughter to get married. They ask why families work, and how they work, and are they worth making work. Despite the gentle ending, this is among his most pessimistic works.
