Snow Falling on Cedars is a novel of about love, prejudice, family, friendship, and ethics. Its plot is framed around a courtroom drama which occurs shortly after World War II: the trial of a Japanese man for the murder of his white neighbor and former high school classmate. Both men are salmon fishermen, operating off San Piedro Island (a stand-in for Washington State’s Bainbridge Island); they are also linked by their competing ties to a piece of the island’s rich strawberry land. Tension runs high during the trial, fed by racial antagonism and war memories; the island’s Japanese community is also angry over recent exile to internment camps, which their neighbors did nothing to stop.
The novel’s center of consciousness, newspaper man Ishmael Chambers, is himself a man divided: he was in love as a boy with Hatsue Miyamoto, wife of the accused, and has never forgiven her for leaving him; he also lost an arm in a Pacific battle; and yet he is sympathetic to the island’s Japanese, aware of the injustices done them. The plot’s mystery is beautifully handled, full of suspense, with a perfectly-timed resolution. It is the book’s examination of human interactions, though–its examination of betrayal and need and indebtedness and basic human decency–that make it so evocative.
Snow Falling on Cedars won many awards, including the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was made into a movie in 1999, directed by Scott Hicks. An excellent reading group site relative to this book is maintained by Vintage Books at www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/snow. It contains a summary of plot and themes, background on Japanese settlement in the west and internment, and extensive questions for discussion.
David Guterson was born in Seattle in 1956; his father was a distinguished criminal defense lawyer. He received his M.A. from the University of Washington, evolving his philosophy that, while fiction “shouldn’t dictate to people what their morality should be,” writers have a “very important obligation” to present “moral questions for reflection.”
Guterson first taught high school English but is now a full-time writer, living on Bainbridge Island with his wife and four children. In addition to Snow Falling on Cedars, he has also published The Drowned Son (1996), East of the Mountains (1999), and Our Lady of the Forest (2003), along with a collection of short stories (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind [1989]) and a book in praise of homeschooling (Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense [1992]). His sister Mary Guterson is also a novelist (We Are All Fine Here, 2005).
1. How does the novel’s rural island setting affect the interaction of its characters? “Identity was geography instead of blood,” says Ishmael at one point (p. 206). What does he mean by that?
2. How (besides the war) can you account for the distance between the Japanese and their neighbors? Why doesn’t anybody defend them when they are ordered to the internment camps?
3. Why are Ishmael and Hatsue drawn to each other? Why does she eventually turn her back on him? Why does he decide to help her husband, if he’s so angry at her?
4. What is the significance of the snowstorm? How does it influence the plot? How does it function metaphorically?
5. How has experience in World War II shaped novel’s male characters? We expect war to harden people, but here it seems to ultimately lead to empathy for many characters. Does that make sense to you?
6. Do the characters in this book take their identity from the landscape around them? Is their relationship with it “western” in ways that you can define?
7. What “moral questions for reflection” does this novel raise? Does it suggest any answers?