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The troubled life of a tortured young artist has often proved fruitful fodder for a tragic biopic, juxtaposing their boundless creativity with their descent into madness, ill-health or an untimely grave.

Izuru Narushima’s latest drama, Father of the Milky Way Railroad, attempts to tell just such a story, albeit with a slight narrative twist. His film follows the brief yet fruitful life of novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa, who is today regarded as one of the finest writers of children’s literature to have emerged from the late Taisho and early Showa periods in Japan – broadly, the 1920s and early ’30s.

Narushima’s approach is to chronicle Miyazawa’s childhood and short life from the point of view of his parents, a wealthy pawnbroker couple from Iwate prefecture.

After initially hoping that his son would follow him into the family business, Kenji’s father, Masajiro (Koji Yakusho), is supportive of his boy’s wish to continue with his studies. However, every time Kenji (Masaki Suda) returns home, he appears to be increasingly troubled.

Whether pursuing different Buddhist disciplines or becoming involved in campaigning for farmers’ rights, the young man’s unbridled, yet also untamed passion proves increasingly destabilising.

His younger sister Toshi (Nana Mori) is equally enthusiastic about her brother’s writing, and urges him to continue creating the beautifully descriptive tales that would earn him the nickname “the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan”. But when tragedy strikes the family, Kenji becomes irrevocably untethered.

As portrayed by Suda, Miyazawa remains a largely enigmatic figure, wandering in and out of his parents’ lives – and the movie – without giving viewers much with which to make an emotional connection.

Audiences who do not already have a strong familiarity with Miyazawa’s writings will remain largely in the dark as to what he wrote about and why it continues to prove so popular to this day.

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During his lifetime, Miyazawa’s novels and poetry went largely ignored, and Narushima struggles to find a suitably dramatic pay-off for his film, save for killing off a procession of family members.

There is nothing on screen to suggest that beloved novels such as Night on the Galactic Railroad – from which the film takes its title – would be adapted into enduringly popular stage plays, musicals and films in the years to follow.

All we are able to glean from Narushima’s film is that Miyazawa wielded a deftness for describing the natural world in a visually poetic manner, and that his own parents only came to appreciate his craft in the twilight of his young life.

For the uninitiated, Father of the Milky Way Railroad leaves Miyazawa and his art frustratingly out of reach.

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