General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The End of Summer (小早川家の秋)

The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, Kohayagawa-ke no Aki, also released as Early Autumn) is a 1961 Japanese family drama directed by Yasujiro Ozu, written by Ozu with his longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, and distributed by Toho. It follows the Kohayagawa family, owners of an old sake brewery in Fushimi, Kyoto, as the aging patriarch secretly visits a former mistress while his relatives try to arrange marriages for the widowed daughter-in-law and the youngest daughter.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	October 29, 1961, Japan; 103 minutes; color; distributed by Toho¹
Production	Takarazuka Eiga, a Toho-affiliated studio, as its tenth-anniversary commemorative film¹^•²
Position in Ozu's career	His 53rd film and the only one he directed for Toho rather than Shochiku²^•³
Screenplay	Original script by Kogo Noda and Ozu, following their collaboration on Akibiyori (1960)¹
Principal cast	Nakamura Ganjiro (Manbei), Setsuko Hara (Akiko), Yoko Tsukasa (Noriko), Michiyo Aratama (Fumiko), Keiju Kobayashi (Hisao), Hisaya Morishige (Isomura)²
Key crew	Cinematography Asakazu Nakai, music Toshiro Mayuzumi, art direction Tomoo Shimogawara²
Home video	Released in North America in Criterion's Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu DVD box set, now out of print⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The Kohayakawa family has run a sake brewery in Fushimi, Kyoto, for generations. The patriarch, Manbei (Nakamura Ganjiro), is 65 and has handed the business to his daughter Fumiko's husband, Hisao; he occupies himself with marrying off his daughter-in-law Akiko, widowed by the death of his eldest son, and his youngest daughter Noriko.¹

Akiko, who works at a gallery on Midosuji in Osaka, is introduced to Isomura, an ironworks owner, through Manbei's brother-in-law Kitagawa, but she cannot bring herself to commit to remarriage.¹^•⁶ Noriko turns down an arranged match because she secretly loves Teramoto, a former university classmate now transferred to Sapporo.¹

The family grows suspicious of Manbei's restless comings and goings. A clerk tails him and loses him; when Fumiko and Hisao investigate, they find he has been visiting Tsune, a former mistress he had not seen in nineteen years, and her daughter Yuriko, who calls him father.¹ After a scare in which he complains of heart pain and then recovers overnight, Manbei spends a day at the bicycle races with Tsune and dies of a heart attack at her house that night.¹

At the gathering to collect his ashes, Hisao reveals that a merger of the brewery is imminent, and the family business faces absorption by larger capital. Noriko decides to go to Sapporo to be with Teramoto, with Akiko's blessing; Akiko resolves to remain unmarried. The film closes on the crematorium smoke drifting into the autumn sky.¹

Cast and characters

Nakamura Ganjiro, the celebrated Kabuki and film actor, plays Manbei. Setsuko Hara, Ozu's most frequent leading actress, plays Akiko; Yoko Tsukasa plays Noriko; Michiyo Aratama plays Fumiko; and Keiju Kobayashi plays Hisao. Hisaya Morishige plays Isomura, the remarriage prospect, and Chieko Naniwa plays Tsune.²^•⁴ Chishu Ryu, a fixture of Ozu's stock company, appears as a farmer, and Haruko Sugimura plays Manbei's sister Shige.⁴

Production background

Ozu spent his career at Shochiku, but Toho brought him over for this production, his third film made outside his home studio.¹^•³ The film was shot at Takarazuka Eiga and marked that studio's tenth anniversary, and it was entered in the 1961 (Showa 36) Arts Festival.¹ Because Ozu worked outside Shochiku, the casting mixed his regular troupe with Toho's leading players, a combination the film's own promotional materials describe as unusually lavish.² A contemporary account notes that under the five-studio exclusivity agreements then in force, the appearance of Shochiku and Toho stars together made the film a rarity.⁵

The dialogue is delivered in a relaxed Kansai dialect, and the story is set among the dark townhouses of Kyoto, giving the film a regional flavor unusual in Ozu's work.²

Themes and critical reception

The film blends comedy and tragedy around the death of a wayward old father. The American painter and critic Manny Farber, whose essay "Ozu's Films" was first published in Artforum in June 1975, counted the crematorium smokestack rising over an empty, featureless landscape among the film's most powerful images, signifying the close of an elderly roué who slipped away to spend a day at the bicycle races with his mistress and perished from overexertion; in Farber's view, Nakamura's Manbei was the sole unruly figure in a household of self-restrained, dutiful people.⁷

The Harvard Film Archive's program notes read the film as one of Ozu's most self-reflexive works: the casting of Hara as a widowed daughter-in-law recalls Tokyo Story (1953), the casting of Nakamura as a womanizing father echoes Floating Weeds (1959), and the use of the name Noriko for a character urged into an arranged marriage references Early Summer (1951).⁸ The film also carries an economic undertone: the brewery's impending merger with a larger company places the family's way of life under the pressure of postwar corporate consolidation.¹

Place in Ozu's late work

The End of Summer belongs to Ozu's late color period. He made his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, in 1962 and died in 1963 at age sixty.⁴ The film has remained in circulation: it appears on streaming services in Japan and was included in the digital restoration program of sixteen Ozu films shown at the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival marking the 120th anniversary of his birth.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026