SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS: A Review

On a bleak winter’s day in January, nothing beats curling up with a cup of hot tea and a good book. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, is a perfect choice for metaphorically shivering in your cozy chair.

The story takes place in the ironically named town Amity, on an island in Puget Sound off the coast of Washington in 1954, nine years after the end of World War II. It soon becomes apparent that the war and its consequences still haunt the islanders. Kabuo Miyamoto, an American of Japanese ancestry, is on trial for the murder of his fellow veteran and neighbor, Carl Heine. The trial, held during a December blizzard, reveals deep prejudice between the islanders of European/ German descent and those of Japanese descent. Their scars barely hide the festering wounds and smoldering resentments from war-time activities.

Through flashbacks skillfully woven into the trial narrative, Guterson takes readers back to the war years when the Japanese American citizens were rounded up and sent to Manzanar. Gradually we learn how Kabuo’s and Carl’s lives intertwined around seven acres of disputed strawberry fields. And we watch with sympathy as their high school classmate, Ishmael, an embittered, one-armed war hero-turned-journalist, struggles with his demons from the past, including his never-forgotten love for Kabuo’s wife, Hatsue. Suspenseful, poetic and well-plotted, Snow Falling on Cedars, is at its heart, also a love story, where love and hate  are two sides of the same coin.

With superb, evocative writing, Guterson takes us on a roller coaster ride, making us question our own convictions and prejudices as we consider Kabuo’s guilt or innocence. Guterson’s vividly portrayed characters reveal a community deeply divided by cultural rifts and mutual suspicions. Like To Kill A Mockingbird, another famous novel revolving around a trial, Snow Falling on Cedars examines  themes of prejudice, justice and personal integrity, with a deep understanding of the human heart and its weaknesses. It “portrays the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance”(from dust jacket blurb), and makes us realize that love, chance, and accident all play a part in the universe of humanity.

This is historical fiction at its best, with solid research backing the story and nuanced characters so real they could be our own neighbors. Even though 1954 and WWII were before I was born, even though I’ve never gone gill-netting in the Pacific Northwest, or dug goeducks on a beach, or sheltered in a cedar tree in the rain, Guterson’s writing transported me to another time and place. This is a book is bound to be a classic, well worth reading and re-reading.