It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that of the half-caste heroine of “A Japanese Nightingale” and the young American whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them.  It is far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is true to humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki and Bigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is of as palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door.  If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it.  Yet, Yuki, though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college in America.  When this brother comes back to Japan ­he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty idyl ­he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his sister’s disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of the young wife and husband.  There is enough incident, but of the kind that is characterized and does not characterize.  The charm, the delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki.  Her father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort of marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English constancy which is not always so evident as in his case qualifies the daughter’s nature.  Her mother was, of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her own people ­the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as in Philadelphia ­because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in what makes her loveliest.  There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette ­it is hardly of the dimensions of a novel ­which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere.  Yuki herself is of a surpassing lovableness.  Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl could, I should think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana’s book from going out and marrying Japanese girls.  They are safe from this, however, for the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safely commended at least to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in the art of imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a long while.  It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to note them.  In fact, I have forgotten them.