Thomas Hardy: Why do the Japanese Like Hardy So Much?

An extract from an essay "Hardy in Japan" by Professor Mamoru Osawa, published in the Official Handbook of The Thomas Hardy Festival, Dorchester, 1968.

  "Why do the Japanese like Hardy's work so much?" Professor Osawa asks himself.

"I think the chief reason is because we have the same moral wavelength as Hardy's, the same 'ache of modernism'".

He continues: