With a baritone protagonist who speaks more than he sings and an actor who mimes more than she speaks, Tokaido Road, Nicola LeFanu's new stage work, is much closer to music theatre than to opera. Inspired by Hiroshige's print series The 53 Stations of the Tokaido, which is based upon a journey the artist took in 1832 from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto, Tokaido Road has a text by Nancy Gaffield, based upon her own collection of poems.

Tokaido Road was conceived expressly for Okeanos, an ensemble that combines western and Japanese instruments, and the hour-long result does sometimes feel more like an awkward hybrid, contrived for such a lineup, than a piece that has evolved inevitably from the dramatic potential of its source. The central character is Hiroshige himself, both in old age as narrator, remembering his epic journey 25 years earlier, and as the young man Hiro living the experiences of that trip; the two are represented by both the baritone (Jeremy Huw Williams) and the actor/mime (Tomoko Kamura). A soprano (Rafaela Papadakis) and a mezzo (Caryl Hughes) are the women that Hiro encounters en route, Kikuyo and Mariko.

But none of them holds the attention. Everything is distanced, nothing engages, and even Kikuyo's suicide hardly impacts at all. Lefanu's score is functional and economical, with the Japanese instruments colouring the sound-world quite discreetly, the koto adding brittleness and the sho piquant clusters to the harmony; the word setting is mostly declamatory. The staging, directed by Caroline Clegg and designed by Kimie Nakano, uses video projections of Hiroshige's prints extensively, though the stylised movements of the singers and the more fluid antics of the mime seem to belong in different worlds. Altogether, there's the sense that Tokaido Road doesn't get where it wants to be, musically or dramatically.

• Repeated at Lake District Summer festival (01539 742621) on 6 August. The Cheltenham Music festival continues until Sunday.