Although it revolves around a mysterious death and subsequent murder trial, Snow Falling on Cedars is not for readers looking for a murder mystery or a courtroom drama. Instead of a fast-paced plot about apprehending a criminal, David Guterson gives readers an atmospheric evocation of a place, its people, and a disreputable period in US history.
On a fictional island off Puget Sound a decade after World War II , Caucasian and Japanese Americans coexist uneasily and scrabble out a living by fishing salmon or growing strawberries. Wartime anti-Japanese sentiments still simmer on one side, while the other smarts from having been suspected of disloyalty and interred in camps during the war.
Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American fisherman and US Army veteran, is accused of murdering a white fisherman, Carl Heine, because of a dispute over land. Reporting his trial is newspaper publisher Ishmael Chambers, who lost his love to Kabuo and lost an arm in the war. Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and Ishmael had been secret teenage sweethearts; she gave him up and married her own kind, and Ishmael has not found happiness since.
The story unfolds slowly and not linearly; frequent flashbacks bring readers to deeper understanding of the island's strained relationships. There is no rush to get to the explanation of how Carl died, because that's not the point. Racism, injustice, honor, love, and doing the right thing are. The pensive writing is almost poetic, evoking the sights and smells of the sea and the land and the feel of the weather. .
Snow Falling on Cedars was a bestseller and won the 1995 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction for first-time author Guterson, who then gave up his teaching career for full-time writing.
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