Living with their widowed father in postwar Nara, three sisters find their quiet domestic life unsettled by the complications of romance. When spirited youngest sister Setsuko realises that her reserved sister Ayako and a visiting family friend are attracted to one another, she takes it upon herself to bring them together, engineering encounters beneath the autumn moon while remaining less certain about the course of her own relationship.

Working from a screenplay by Yasujirō Ozu and Ryosuke Saitō, Kinuyo Tanaka transforms a seemingly familiar story of courtship and family life into something distinctly her own. Her graceful second feature is attentive to the bonds between women and to the competing desires for independence, companionship and change beneath the rhythms of everyday life.

It was through Ozu that the young Shōhei Imamura, then at the beginning of his career at Nikkatsu, came to work on the film as an assistant director – an intriguing encounter between three filmmakers whose very different approaches would each leave their mark on postwar Japanese cinema.