During a hiking trip with office friends, Shoji spends time alone with a fellow worker, a typist nicknamed "Goldfish" for her large eyes (Keiko Kishi).

After the release of Tokyo Story, Ozu was called upon to assist his friend, the actress Kinuyo Tanaka, in completing her second film as director, The Moon Has Risen.

He cast mostly young and popular actors, and, with long-time collaborator Kōgo Noda, delivered a script devoid of the dominant parental figures that were a fixture of his previous films.

"[3] Early Spring makes use of temporal ellipses, gaps in the narrative into which the audience is invited to project meaning, which are common in Ozu's films.

Ozu also omits potentially melodramatic moments: Masako does not discover her husband's lipstick-stained handkerchief on screen, but instead recounts the discovery to her mother.

[4] In a highly positive review, Nora Sayre of The New York Times wrote that the work "conveys the claustrophobia of office life better than any other film I've seen", and that "Ozu finds dramatic depths in quiet, ordinary lives.

[5] In The New Yorker, Richard Brody argued that "Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.

"[6] Don Druker of the Chicago Reader called the film a "casual yet meticulously detailed reconstruction of Japan's routinized white-collar milieu".