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.

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

Where do any of us come from in this cold country?  Oh, Canada, whether it is admitted or not, we come from you we come from you.  From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots.  We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside.  We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly.  We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside down on the prairies, our hair as wild as spider's legs, our feet rooted nowhere.  We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting.  Where do we come from, Obasan?  We come from cemeteries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth.  We come rom our untold tales that wait for their telling.  We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

Naomi Nakane is a schoolteacher in rural Alberta, where her Japanese ancestry makes her--well, not unique, exactly, but it provokes comments from her students, largely the children of white farmers.  Naomi is prickly with her students, resentful toward their ignorance and prying.  Behind the discomfort--behind the central fact of her life in Alberta--is a history that Naomi wants to move past, unlike her Aunt Emily, including her own childhood in Canada's Japanese internment camps and her own separation from her mother and father.  When her great-uncle--Obasan's husband--dies suddenly, she's forced to confront the truth of her internment and the Japanese-Canadian experience as a whole.

Obasan's dive into Naomi's memories is often impressionistic, and though chronological, can be difficult to arrange into a coherent narrative that helps the reader understand exactly where the Japanese were sent and why.  She relies on overheard conversations between adults to fill in the gaps, but the method makes sense--what can a child understand of the reasons that she has been taken from her mother and sent to the British Columbia mountains?  Kogawa renders these scenes with an eye for strong detail, like the orange that Obasan, her aunt, presents to a destitute and desperate mother on the train toward internment, or the treasured doll that gets left behind.  A deep dive through a set of documents provided by her Aunt Emily helps Naomi discover at last what happened to her mother, who returned to Japan instead of being sent to the camps, and Kogawa's description of the destruction by atomic bomb of Nagasaki is an unflinching portrait of pure and honest horror that few real horror books could ever match.

There are few books that are set in Alberta, where I recently went.  At least half of Obasan actually takes place in British Columbia.  But what I didn't expect was that Obasan would feel so relevant and fresh to my own place and time.  It is, at its heart, a story of what happens when you separate families in the name of abstract notions of national security.  What happens is you fuck them up forever.  Naomi's separation from her family--even though much of Obasan is a story of perseverance and strength in the face of adversity--has provided her with nearly insoluble trauma.  Facing it, as her aunt encourages, can bring her to a kind of detente with it, but it is ineradicable.  And as Aunt Emily reminds us, about a different country but not less true: "What this country did to us, it did to itself."  The trauma we inflict on those seeking asylum at our own southern border we inflict on ourselves, and sooner our later, it will come back around to us.

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

In early autumn the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: 'No Japs Allowed.' Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

The Japanese internment during World War II may be the least-discussed major shame in American history. In spite of resistance from some fronts, there is at least a general recognition that slavery was bad and we shouldn't have killed all the the Indians. The Japanese internment, on the other hand, I didn't even learn about in high school. Right-wing shill Michelle Malkin wrote a book in defense of internment, no doubt hoping it would spur a smililar movement toward her own group non grata, Muslims. And Asians, now treated as a model minority by the "I'm not racist but" crowd, are often spoken of as though their American experience has been smooth sailing, never mind that even high profile figures like George Takai were actually in these camps. This isn't ancient history.

I'm not confident I've read anything about the internment in the course of Fifty Books, and When the Emperor Was King did a good job whetting my appetite for more. It's a terse, unsentimental little novel that doesn't even name its characters even as it follows them through the arrest of their father, their own move to and life in an internment camp, and their eventual return home, where they are finally, after several years, reuinited.

When I say this book is unsentimental, it's no joke. The first section--the book is split into five--follows the unnamed mother as she prepares their house for their indefinite absence. Some of the preparations are benign--packing things aways, making sure the faucets are off. Others are more chilling and speak to uncertainty and permenance of their dislocation, like when we follow her to the store where she purchases a new shovel with which to kill and bury the family dog. Does this make her sad? Angry? Resigned? We're never told, just as the children are never told why White Dog isn't coming when she's called.

The train ride to the camp and life in the camp itself is endless monotony punctuated by the terror of being completely powerless and surrounded by those who are indifferent. The girl thinks she seems some humanity on a guard's face, but the reader has no reason to think its real. Shades are kept low lest a passby lob a brick through a window upon realizing the bus is full of 'the enemy'.

And finally, the family returns home, to a house that's been destroyed by tenants who paid no rent or respect; they are greeted, or not greeted, by old friends who now see them as the enemy; they sleep every night with the threat of vandalism, arson, or worse; and they wait for their father to come home. But when he does, he's not the man they remember:

As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room. He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. IQ. with us on the radio. "There's already enough noise in my head," he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he'd get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.

In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper - 'Might as well get the day over with' - but he slept poorly and woke often from the same recurring dream: It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence. "I've got to get back,' he'd wake up shouting.

'You're home now,' our mother would remind him. 'It's all right. You can stay.”

That "You can stay" breaks my heart. It communicates so much that has been surpressed in the book and in history itself. The heartbreak of disassociation, the despair of rejection, the pointless brokenness resulting from racism and fear. And it's a message that can't help but resonate now in the age of Trump, with Muslim bans, mosque bombings, "the wall", and the desire to Make America Great Again--when the question that really needs to be asked is, "Was there ever a time when America was really great?" The least of these would probably answer "no." But maybe instead of repeating history, there is a faint hope that we can learn.