Snow Falling on Cedars
SNOW FALLINGON CEDARS
David Guterson
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1995 by David Guterson
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Nicholas Evans
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted
All rights reserved
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408806760
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To my mother and father,
with gratitude
Praise for
Snow Falling on Cedars
‘
Snow Falling on Cedars
is a vivid and spellbinding novel, made unforgettable by David Guterson’s mastery of detail and his wise and generous heart. I could not put this book down’ Colin Harrison, author of
Bodies Electric
‘A beautifully written book, it is in essence a whodunnit, but is so rich a read that it far outstrips its form’
Scotland on Sunday
‘As much a clever thriller as a poetic evocation of a small community … a novel of both brilliant surface and fascinating depth’
Literary Review
‘An absorbing and beautiful work’
Guardian
‘Dramatic and suspenseful …
Snow Falling on Cedars
announces the emergence of a skilful writer’
Times Literary Supplement
‘
Snow Falling on Cedars
recalls the great morality fictions of the 19th century. By setting his novel in the fifties, Guterson permits himself to skirt the self-referential tropes, the knowing ironies, the supremacy of desire over personal morality, that have become axiomatic in much intelligent modern fiction. It is a risky gambit, but his haunting book is the richer for it’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Compelling … a flawlessly written first novel’
The New York Times
Nicholas Evans
Ten years ago I was in Seattle, attending one of those so-called literary dinners where authors make speeches to plug their books. I’d just finished reading
Snow Falling on Cedars
for the first time and was in that bereaved limbo you enter when you’ve been captivated by a book and suddenly it’s over. The consolation that evening was that ‘local author’ David Guterson was going to be there too.
The place was packed with fans, all doubtless eager, as I was, to get their precious copy of his book personally inscribed. We expected him to transport us back to the strawberry fields and salmon-seething waters of San Piedro island. Instead, he took us to an altogether different world, the orchards of Washington State, delivering a witty and informal lecture about apple growers. It was a subject he’d been researching and soon he had us all entranced.
An hour later, he looked at his watch and, with a kind of boyish charm, said he was sorry but he would have to leave immediately or he’d miss the last ferry home. I got to shake his hand but never got my signed copy. What I did get, however, was a glimpse of what I believe helps make
Snow Falling on Cedars
so
special: a searing intellect, a fascination with detail and a seemingly infinite compassion and curiosity about what it is to be human. The book business, like the movie business, increasingly likes to label things. Every new work, however original, has to belong to a genre. This extraordinary debut novel has thus been called a whodunnit, a thriller, a courtroom drama. It is all of those things but, in essence, none of them.
From the opening close-up of the man at the story’s centre, sitting with dignity in the courtroom where, like the jury, we will witness his trial for murder, we know something special is happening. The court itself, with its groaning, hissing radiators, its grey light, the smell of damp coats and boots, provides the structure of the story and becomes a kind of character itself: a living, listening, omniscient presence. Beyond its four tall, narrowly arched windows, we watch the snow fall. It is as if life on the island of San Piedro – and indeed time itself – has been suspended until a verdict is reached.
Most novelists attempt to convey a sense of place, but with Guterson we’re taken to a different level of knowledge. It soon becomes clear that we are in the hands not simply of a gifted storyteller but of a compulsive researcher. Whether it’s the intricacies of gill-netting salmon or of samurai swordsmanship, almost every page teaches us something new. But the detail is measured and never distracts from story or character. We get to know the island as if we have grown up there. We can smell the tang of netted salmon in the salt air, taste the freshly harvested strawberries, hear the drip of rain on the moss and fern of the forest floor.
Although the present tense of the story is on San Piedro
in 1954, other places at other times are rendered just as vivid: the desert prison camp, with its stinking latrines and relentless sand-laced wind, where the island’s Japanese immigrants are interned after Pearl Harbor; the blood-washed beach in the South Pacific where as a young G.I., Ishmael Chambers – local reporter, spurned lover and our guide through the maze of half-truth, lies and prejudice uttered in the courthouse – is maimed in a poorly planned, heart-thumping, hellish assault.
Guterson’s handling of time is masterly. The transitions between present and past are seamless but we always know precisely where we are and through whose eyes we are watching the events unfold. With a fine economy, he opens up his characters’ lives and tells us their history, their passions and triumphs, the losses, dashed hopes and disillusionments that have shaped them into who they are. Even the most minor of these people, however tangential to the plot, is given his or her own journey, their souls etched, like characters in a Chekhov play, by some hidden yearning or thwarted ambition.
Ultimately, it has to be this very quality, the novel’s understanding of human nature, that has touched the hearts of the many millions who have read it. In particular, it is the compassionate light its author sheds on how the seeds of racism are sown; on the way man and woman, parent and child, affect each other; on that exquisite pain we inflict on those we love, and who love us, the most.
I’m a slow reader and as I grow older and less patient, there is a test I’ve come to apply to whether a book has been worth reading. Has it, I ask myself, given me any new insight into the frenzied muddle and puzzle that life seems to be? Without
wanting to be too grandiose about it, has it, in short, furthered my understanding of the human condition?
Every time I read
Snow Falling on Cedars,
the answer is an ever more resounding yes.
I thank the many people who contributed to the writing of this book: Mike Hobbs at Harborview Hospital in Seattle, for his help with matters of forensic pathology; Phil McCrudden for taking me salmon fishing and for carefully reading a draft of the novel; Steve Shapiro for his insights about gill-netting; Leonard Hayashida for his gentle and precise commentary; Walt and Millie Woodward for their courage and conviction as owner-editors of the
Bainbridge Review
; Ann Radwick for assistance with local sources; Murray Guterson and Rob Crichton for their assistance regarding legal esoterica; Frank Kitamoto and Hisa Matsudaira for help in my research and interviews; the Bainbridge Historical Society for access to its archives and museum; the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library for assistance with its microfilm collection; Captain Alan Gill for his expertise regarding ships and shipping and for his comments about the book; and Robin Guterson for her willingness to discuss this story with me over the course of many years.
I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the following sources: Dudley Witney’s fine book
The Lighthouse,
an architectural and pictorial history; Charles F. Chapman’s
Piloting, Seamanship and Small Boat Handling
and Brandt Aymar and John Marshall’s
Guide to Boatmanship;
Jim Gibbs’s
Disaster Log of Ships,
a pictorial account of shipwrecks from California to Alaska; Hazel Heckman’s
Island in the Sound,
a psychologically and culturally accurate portrait of island life in Washington; Joe Upton’s marvelous
Alaska Blues,
a beautifully written book about commercial fishing in coastal waters; and Sallie Tisdale’s
Stepping Westward,
with its brilliant and exacting descriptions of the Pacific Northwest woods.
Also, James L. Stokesbury’s
A Short History of World War II,
Richard F. Newcomb’s
Iwo Jima,
Rafael Steinberg’s
Island Fighting,
Edwin P. Hoyt’s
The Battle of Leyte Gulf,
Studs Terkel’s
The Good War,
and Eric M. Hammel and John E. Lane’s 76
Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa,
all of which were troubling and helpful.
I am further indebted to Ronald Takaki’s brilliant book,
Strangers from a Different Shore,
a history of Asian Americans; to Monica Sone’s
Nisei Daughter
and Akemi Kikumura’s
Through Harsh Winters,
two moving accounts of Japanese-American families before, during, and after World War II; to Seymour Wishram’s
Anatomy of a Jury,
an exacting account of our criminal justice system; to Peter Irons’s
Justice at War
for its insight into the internment years; to
Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress,
edited by Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano; to John Armor and Peter Wright’s
Manzanar,
with photographs by Ansel Adams and commentary by John Hersey; and to Karlfried Graf von Durckheim’s
The Japanese Cult of Tranquility,
Julia V. Nakamura’s
The Japanese Tea Ceremony,
and Alan W. Watts’s The
Way of Zen.
Local sources to which I owe a debt include Elsie Franklund Warner’s
Bainbridge Through Bifocals,
Katy Warner’s
A History of Bainbridge Island,
the Bainbridge School District’s
They Cast a Long Shadow,
Junkoh Hand’s “Garden Nostalgia” column in the Bainbridge Gardens’
Garden News,
and the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community Association’s “For the Sake of the Children” photograph exhibit.