Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

He felt certain that he should carry his camera, though, since a blizzard like this one did not come along often--the last had hit in '36--and was sure to do the sort of damage that constituted island news.  Nonetheless, from Ishmael's perspective this inclement weather should not be allowed to overshadow the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, which was an affair of a different sort entirely and of a greater magnitude.  In the hearts of his fellow islanders, though, weather of this sort overwhelmed absolutely everything, so that even when a man stood trial for his life it was no doubt the destruction of docks and bulkheads, the trees fallen on homes, the burst pipes, the stranded cars, that would most interest San Piedro's citizens.  Ishmael, a native, could not understand how such transitory and accidental occurrences gained the upper hand in their view of things.  It was as if they had been waiting all along for something enormous to enter their lives and make them part of the news.  On the other hand the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto was the first island murder trial in twenty-eight years--Ishmael had looked it up in back issues of the Review--and unlike the storm was a human affair, stood squarely in the arena of human responsibility, was no mere accident of wind and sea but a thing humans could make sense of.  Its progress, its impact, its outcome, its meaning--these were in the hands of the people.

On a dangerously snowy day on one of Washington's San Juan Islands, a man is on trial for murder.  The victim is Carl Heine, a fisherman found drowned, with a head wound, dangling from the net of his own boat.  The accused is Kabuo Miyamoto, another fisherman.  The theory of the prosecutor goes like this: Miyamoto's father was once a strawberry picker working for Heine's father, and the two men game to an agreement under which the elder Miyamoto would buy a small part of the strawberry farm in installments.  That plan is only months from completion when World War II breaks out, and the Miyamoto family, like all the Japanese families in the San Juan Islands, are carted off to the interment camps at Manzanar in California.  The elder Heine dies, and his bitter, bigoted widow refuses to honor the agreement.  She sells the farm to another man, who eventually sells it back to Carl Heine, the son of the former owner.

Did Kabuo kill Carl out of anger, because he refused to honor, at long last, the agreement their fathers came to?  Snow Falling on Cedars is a novel about an immediate act of (supposed) violence, but also about a violence that takes place on such a scale as to not be recognizable as violence.  The internment of the local Japanese Americans destabilizes not just their slice of the community but the community as a whole: shrinks it, arrests it.  The trial pokes at buried grievances, not just the conflict between the Miyamotos and the Heines, but also the interrupted relationship between a young Ishmael Chambers, now the editor of the local newspaper, and Hatsue Imada, now Kabuo's wife.  The young Hatsue, as recounted in flashbacks, has doubts about whether her affection for Ishmael is really love, or whether it can overcome the separation between the white and Japanese communities, but these doubts are never really resolved because internment interrupts them.  It certainly interrupts the life of Ishmael, who spends decades pining for Hatsue, unable to move on because the sudden reality of internment made it impossible.  He finds evidence that may absolve Kabuo, but what will he do with it?

Snow Falling on Cedars is part courtroom drama, part middlebrow trauma narrative.  It can be quite beautiful--the blizzard, and the slightly exotic setting, do a lot of heavy lifting--but it doesn't demand much more from the reader than a belief that racism is a bad thing.  Maybe in this age of modern internment that's not something to be discounted.  It's a page-turner in the most literal sense; even at close to 500 pages I found I couldn't put it down.  I read it on an airplane, and I think that was the perfect place for it; it kept me busy but offered few surprises or difficulties that might not survive distraction.  Having finished it almost a week ago, I'm finding that it's difficult to dredge up something to say about it.  For a novel about trauma that lasts through generations, it ended up being pretty forgettable.