[1][2][3] After the death of his father, Hideo and his mother Shigeko leave Ueda, Nagano, for Tokyo, where she starts a job at a ryokan, while Hideo moves in with his uncle's family.
He befriends the slightly younger Junko, the daughter of Shigeko's employer Naoyo, herself the mistress of a married businessman who finances the ryokan.
The two children start making repeated trips around the city together, which finally lead them to the ocean that Hideo only knows from pictures.
In his 2008 Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors, film historian Alexander Jacoby called The Approach of Autumn a "precise, clear‒eyed story of a child's emotional life, with something of the bittersweet quality of [Hiroshi] Shimizu".
[4] The Approach of Autumn was screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2006.