Snow Falling on Cedars
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Chambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs the island newspaper inherited from his father, is among the journalists covering the trial--a trial that brings him close, once again, to Hatsue Miyamoto, the wife of the accused man and Ishmael's never-forgotten boyhood love. Now, as a heavy snowfall impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial, he and others must reckon with the past, with culture, nature, and love, and with the possibilities of the human will. Both suspenseful and beautifully crafted, Snow Falling on Cedars 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.
Editor of San Piedro's newspaper and a WWII Marine veteran who lost an arm at the Battle of Tarawa; covers Kabuo's trial as a journalist.
Kabuo's wife, who grew up on San Piedro and was secretly involved with Ishmael Chambers as a teenager before the war.
A decorated veteran of the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, charged with the murder of fisherman Carl Heine Jr.
Carl Heine Sr.'s widow, whose refusal to complete a land sale to the Miyamoto family looms over the trial.
The county prosecutor who argues that racial prejudice and a land grudge gave Kabuo Miyamoto a motive for murder.
No. David Guterson invented the murder trial and the fictional San Piedro Island, but he grounded the novel in real history: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in Europe while many of its soldiers' families were held in camps like Manzanar.
It won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, one of the most prestigious American literary prizes. It was David Guterson's debut novel.