In An Autumn Afternoon, Toyo Takahashi plays the owner of a little restaurant where Chishu Ryu and Nobuo Nakamura have a meeting with Ryuji Kita. Chishu and Nobuo tease Toyo and call Kita who, having got married for the second time, to a young woman, might well die from exhaustion. Toyo Takahashi keeps silent. Ryuji Kita appears, smiling modestly. The spirit of the sequence is a unique comedy, due to the rhythm with a delayed effect that is typical of Ozu. This is the film that is a testament to Yasujiro Ozu: it is able to gather a certain tension even with it being a comedy. […] From the moment when the young wife comes into the men’s sacred space, Ryuji Kita becomes aware that he has broken the taboo; he is left troubled and quickly leaves with her. This sudden departure naturally offers the opportunity for new irony. […] The friends’ trivial gossip and jokes in the private room of the restaurant even seem to be a long digression with no relationship to the main plot, like a pause in the narrative rhythm. Instead, they are there to allude to the fundamentally serious theme. The room on the first floor of the Japanese house in the final Ozu film is the exact equivalent of the private room in the restaurant (the men’s domain). Like the room in the restaurant, which is almost an abstract space, cut off from the outside world, the room on the first floor is separated from the living space […]. If the first room is characterized by the exclusion of a feminine element, the women’s sacred space eschews any male presence.

Shiguehiko Hasumi, Yasujiro Ozu, Collection Auteurs – Cahiers du cinéma, Paris 1998