‘Father of the Milky Way Railroad’: Writer biopic plays to domestic audience's love of a good cry

Japanese biopics generally don’t travel well: A famous historical figure here is usually only slightly known to international audiences at best. Also, the films’ hagiographic portraits have little appeal to non-Japanese who aren’t already fans.

Izuru Narushima’s “Father of the Milky Way Railroad” tries a different, more interesting approach to the life of poet and writer Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), who is beloved in Japan but not as well-known abroad as the Danish author to whom he is often compared, Hans Christian Andersen.

The film traces Miyazawa’s life from his birth in 1896 in Iwate Prefecture to his death from acute pneumonia at age 37 in 1933, but its focus is his father, Masajiro Miyazawa (Koji Yakusho), a well-off pawnbroker in the Iwate city of Hanamaki. Based on a novel by Yoshinobu Kadoi, the film portrays him as a refreshingly atypical Japanese movie dad of his or even the modern era.

Though he wants Kenji to follow him in the pawnbroking business, just as he followed his own hidebound, irascible pawnbroker father (Min Tanaka), Masajiro is a proud, loving parent, beginning with his unrestrained joy over Kenji’s birth and his unabashed fear when the boy falls ill (“If he dies, I die,” he proclaims). Masajiro also considers himself a modern man of Meiji (1868-1912), a period when Japan broke with feudalism and embraced the West, including its preference for nurturing individual talent rather than suppressing it in the name of custom and tradition.

All this and more make him a sympathetic protagonist, a feeling the casting of Yakusho — Japan’s Tom Hanks — reinforces. Yakusho is a versatile actor who can inhabit dark, complex characters with authority, but nice-guy Masajiro is a role he can play in his sleep.

Not that he phones in his performance, nor do the other members of the main cast, especially Masaki Suda as Kenji. The star of the hit 2021 romance drama “We Made a Beautiful Bouquet,” Suda completely erases his heartthrob image as Kenji, playing the character with a shaved head, gaunt physique and eyes blazing with sincerity, passion and a touch of mania, religious and otherwise.

The story follows the outlines of Kenji’s life and career as a children’s literature author, while conveniently eliding or changing what doesn’t fit the father-son narrative. Kenji’s junior high school days get the chop, save for Masajiro’s sorrowful observation that his son graduated in 60th place out of a class of 88. But he decides to send Kenji to high school, and then college, nonetheless.

A main driver of the plot is Kenji’s relationship with his younger sister, Toshi (Nana Mori), who loves hearing him tell stories and urges him to write. When, as a young adult, Toshi falls ill from tuberculosis, Kenji attends to her every need and is shattered to the point of insanity when she finally succumbs. Then, just as he is finding recognition as a writer, if not yet fortune or fame, his lungs also weaken, and Masajiro agonizes over his decline.

The sickroom scenes dominate the film’s second half and are staged for maximum heartrending pathos. In other words, exactly what you would expect from a genius-dying-young biopic for the domestic audience, which likes nothing more than a good cry.

The film rises above these box-office formulas, though, with the purity and undying strength of the characters’ love for each other. That is, it’s very Miyazawa-esque, in the end.