Almost totally unknown as a poet in his lifetime, Miyazawa's work gained its reputation posthumously,[4] and enjoyed a boom by the mid-1990s on his centenary.

Miyazawa was born in the town of Hanamaki,[6] Iwate, the eldest son[7] of a wealthy pawnbroking couple, Masajirō and his wife Ichi.

[5] Miyazawa was a keen student of natural history from an early age, and also developed an interest as a teenager in poetry, coming under the influence of a local poet, Takuboku Ishikawa.

[5][13] As a result of differences with his father over religion, his repugnance for commerce, and the family pawnshop business in particular (he yielded his inheritance to his younger brother Seiroku),[5] he left Hanamaki for Tokyo in January 1921.

[5] He managed to put out a collection of poetry, Haru to Shura (春と修羅, "Spring and the Demon") in April 1924, thanks to some borrowings and a major subvention from a producer of nattō.

[16] His collection of children's stories and fairy tales, Chūmon no Ōi Ryōriten (注文の多い料理店, "The Restaurant of Many Orders"), also self-published, came out in December of the same year.

[5][6] Although neither were commercial successes — they were largely ignored — his work did come to the attention of the poets Kōtarō Takamura and Shinpei Kusano, who admired his writing greatly and introduced it to the literary world.

[21] According to Jouko Lindstedt, Kenji was made interested in Esperanto by the Finnish scientist and Esperantist Gustaf John Ramstedt, who was working as a diplomat for Finland in Japan.

He was a prolific writer of children's stories, many of which appear superficially light or humorous but include messages intended for the moral education of the reader.

He wrote some works in prose and some stage plays for his students and left behind a large amount of tanka and free verse, most of which was discovered and published posthumously.

[30] Kenji started writing poetry as a schoolboy, and composed over a thousand tanka[9] beginning at roughly age 15,[7] in January 1911, a few weeks after the publication of Takuboku's "A Handful of Sand".

Keene said of these early poems that they "were crude in execution, [but] they already prefigure the fantasy and intensity of emotion that would later be revealed in his mature work".

[34] He is said also to have written three thousand pages a month worth of children's stories during this period,[14] thanks to the advice of a priest in the Nichiren order, Takachiyo Chiyō.

[14] The "charms of Kenji's poetry", critic Makota Ueda writes, include "his high idealism, his intensely ethical life, his unique cosmic vision, his agrarianism, his religious faith, and his rich and colorful vocabulary."

Ultimately, Ueda writes, "they are all based in a dedicated effort to unify the heterogeneous elements of modern life into a single, coherent whole.

Several lines uttered by his sister are written in a regional dialect so unlike Standard Japanese that Kenji provided translations at the end of the poem.

[38] The poem lacks any kind of regular meter, but draws its appeal from the raw emotion it expresses; Keene suggests that Kenji learned this poetic technique from Sakutarō Hagiwara.

[38] Kenji could write a huge volume of poetry in a short time, based mostly on impulse, seemingly with no preconceived plan of how long the poem would be and without considering future revisions.

[6] His best-known stories include Night on the Galactic Railroad (銀河鉄道の夜, Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru), The Life of Budori Gusuko (グスコーブドリの伝記, Gusukō Budori no Denki), Matasaburō of the Wind [ja] (風の又三郎, Kaze no Matasaburō), Gauche the Cellist (セロ弾きのゴーシュ, Sero Hiki no Gōshu), The Night of Taneyamagahara (種山ヶ原の夜, Taneyamagahara no Yoru), Vegetarian Great Festival (ビジテリアン大祭, Bijiterian Taisai), and The Dragon and the Poet (龍と詩人, Ryū to Shijin) In 1919, Kenji edited a volume of extracts from the writings of Nichiren,[14] and in December 1925[42] a solicitation to build a Nichiren temple (法華堂建立勧進文, Hokke-dō konryū kanjin-bun) in the Iwate Nippo under a pseudonym.

[42] Kenji was born into a family of Pure Land Buddhists, but in 1915 converted to Nichiren Buddhism upon reading the Lotus Sutra and being captivated by it.

[9] His conversion created a rift with his relatives, but he nevertheless became active in trying to spread the faith of the Lotus Sutra, walking the streets crying Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō.

[14] From January to September 1921, he lived in Tokyo working as a street proselytizer for the Kokuchūkai, a Buddhist-nationalist organization[43] that had initially turned down his service.

[citation needed] He made a deathbed request to his father to print one thousand copies of the sutra in Japanese translation and distribute them to friends and associates.

[9] He loved his native province, and the mythical landscape of his fiction, known by the generic neologism, coined in a poem in 1923, as Īhatōbu (Ihatov) is often thought to allude to Iwate (Ihate in the older spelling).

[50] Among the variation of names, there is Ihatovo, and the addition of final o is supposed to be the noun ending of Esperanto, whose idea of common international language interested him.

Some years earlier Jane Imamura at the Buddhist Study Center in Berkeley had shown him a Kenji translation which had impressed him.

[citation needed] It displays the few manuscripts and artifacts from Kenji's life that escaped the destruction of Hanamaki by American bombers in World War II.

The 1985 anime adaptation of Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night on the Galactic Railroad), in which all signs in Giovanni and Campanella's world are written in Esperanto, is based on Masumura's manga.

The Japanese culture and lifestyle television show Begin Japanology aired on NHK World featured a full episode on Miyazawa Kenji in 2008.

[60] The 2015 anime Punch Line and its video game adaptation feature a self-styled hero who calls himself Kenji Miyazawa and has a habit of quoting his poetry when arriving on scene.