Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson (1994)
“A Japanese-American fisherman is on trial for murder in a courtroom where every juror remembers the internment camps. The journalist covering the case once loved the defendant's wife — and holds evidence that could set him free.”
Short Summary
In 1954, on the fictional San Piedro Island in the Pacific Northwest, Kabuo Miyamoto — a Japanese-American gill-net fisherman — is tried for the murder of Carl Heine, a white fisherman found drowned in his own nets. The island community, still scarred by the internment of its Japanese residents during World War II, watches the trial unfold during a massive snowstorm. Ishmael Chambers, the local newspaper editor and a man who lost his arm at Tarawa, discovers evidence that could exonerate Kabuo — but Ishmael once loved Kabuo's wife Hatsue, and his bitterness threatens to override his conscience. The novel braids courtroom testimony, wartime flashbacks, adolescent love, and the silent racism of a small community into a meditation on whether justice is possible when an entire society is implicated in prejudice.
Detailed Summary
The novel opens in a courtroom on San Piedro Island, a small fishing community in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, in December 1954. Snow is falling. It will fall for the entire duration of the trial, burying the island under a silence that mirrors the community's buried prejudices. Kabuo ...