Snow Falling On Cedars

“Snow Falling on Cedars” is a Contemporary Fiction book written by David Guterson. David Guterson was inspired to write this book based on his experience living in the Northwest. The novel is based on Japanese-Americans and how they were victims of prejudice due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. In the Novel, there is a Japanese family known as the Miyamoto family that experience what most Japanese-Americans went through while getting taken to the Internment Camps and how they lost everything including their homes when they were released. The setting of the book is placed in a small island in Puget Sound named San Piedro where the time period was 1954. I chose this book because I wanted to learn more about the experience Japanese-Americans
went through but also wanted to read something that made me not want to close the book. This book was perfect because it involves a sort of forbidden love, culture, racism, and the act of leaving the past behind you. I personally would recommend it. This novel is about a Japanese-American named Kabuo Miyamoto who is put on trial for being accused of murdering Carl Heine Jr. The main characters in the book are Kabuo Miyamoto (a Japanese-American fisherman), Ishmael Chambers (the protagonist in the book and newspaper editor of the San Piedro local newspaper), Hatsue Imada/Miyamoto (Kabuo’s wife), and Carl Heine Jr. (the dead white fisherman who had an unexpected death). They all have history one way or another, but there was love between Ishmael and Hatsue that ended badly where Hatsue rejected Ishmael during their adolescence. The main question I kept asking myself throughout the novel was will Ishmael use his power and influence as a newspaper editor to intervene and assist Kabuo’s case (even though he wants revenge on Hatsue for her rejection) or will he take advantage of this situation to get revenge on Hatsue? During the characters’ childhood years, they were all residents in the small island where they knew each other one way or another.
Carl’s dad owned a strawberry farm where Kabuo and his parents used to work as sharecroppers; that’s where Carl and Kabuo became really good friends. Kabuo’s dad really embodied the traditional Japanese values, so he started teaching Kabuo “Kendo” (stick fighting) where he ended up becoming a master of that Martial Art. Ishmael and Hatsue had a deep friendship as children where Ishmael ended up falling in love with her. Hatsue had grown up with traditional Japanese parents as well where she was torn between demands of two sets of values. One of them was the belief to live unrestrained of society’s demands (The American lifestyle). The other was the traditional Japanese value which was that life is full of suffering and misfortune, therefore, individuals must accept the limitations of their life and try their utmost to fulfill their duty to family and community (as in the Japanese community). Eventually, she decided to follow her traditional Japanese values which was the reason for Ishmael’s rejection and her marriage with Kabuo. This left Ishmael devastated. But then, something greater happened; The bombing of Pearl Harbor. This eventually led up to World War 2 where Ishmael, Carl, and Kabuo felt they were obliged to serve for their country. However, Kabuo’s main excuse to go to war was to prove his loyalty to the United States. By the time they
were done serving in the war, they dealt with their trauma differently. Ishmael had his left arm amputated due to a gunshot wound and he still hadn’t gotten over Hatsue’s rejection so those things accumulated to create a bitter and resentful man. Carl became a physically strong but quiet man. He was San Piedro’s ideal citizen where he was well respected and learned to cope with his trauma by leaving the memories created in the battlefield behind him. However, everyone always felt distant to him and after the war, he developed prejudice towards people who had any kind of Japanese descent. Kabuo was always a kind and thoughtful man. But the war left him feeling guilty about killing Germans in the war which he mentions will always haunt him. This also explains why Kabuo feels that even though he’s innocent of killing Carl, he feels that he deserves imprisonment for killing all those Germans. Ishmael knows he has evidence to prove innocence to Kabuo, but throughout the whole novel, he is indecisive due to the reasons I mentioned earlier involving Hatsue.
The proof is in a lighthouse located around San Piedro where you can find a logbook that recorded a large freighter boat getting lost on the island. The ship had been advised by a radioman in the lighthouse to go directly through the channel Carl was fishing in. The logbook also mentioned the freighter passing through Carl’s area around the same time Carl had approximately died which most likely knocked Carl’s boat over and was the cause for his head wounds. But since the courtroom didn’t know about this information, they assumed the head wounds were those related to the wounds caused in Japanese Kendo. The novel ends with the Judge making the decision of proving Kabuo guilty until Ishmael decides to give the information right before the case is closed. Kabuo is then released where he is reunited with his family. Honestly, at first, when I was reading the book, I was so confused and bored out of my mind. But then, you get closer and closer to the ending where you want to keep reading to figure out what happens next and all the pieces just seem to add up together. Therefore, once again, I fully recommend
it.