Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  Mrs. Shigemura was open and forthright with Hatsue about matters of a sexual nature. With all the seriousness of a fortune-teller she predicted that white men would desire Hatsue and seek to destroy her virginity. She claimed that white men carried in their hearts a secret lust for pure young Japanese girls. Look at their magazines and moving pictures, Mrs. Shigemura said. Kimonos, sake, rice paper walls, coquettish and demure geishas. White men had their fantasies of a passionate Japan – girls of burnished skin and willowy long legs going barefoot in the wet heat of rice paddies – and this distorted their sex drives. They were dangerous egomaniacs and utterly convinced that Japanese women worshiped them for their pale skin and for their ambitious courage. Stay away from white men, said Mrs. Shigemura, and marry a boy of your own kind whose heart is strong and good.

  Her parents had sent Hatsue to Mrs. Shigemura with the intent that the girl would not forget that she was first and foremost Japanese. Her father, a strawberry farmer, had come from Japan, from people who had been pottery makers for as long as anyone in his prefecture could remember. Hatsue’s mother, Fujiko – the daughter of a modest family near Kure, hardworking shopkeepers and rice wholesalers – had come to America as Hisao’s picture bride on board the Korea Maru. The marriage was arranged by a baishakunin who told the Shibayamas that the potential groom had made a fortune in the new country. But the Shibayamas were owners of a respectable house, and it seemed to them that Fujiko, the daughter in question, could do better than to marry a hired hand in America. Then the baishakunin, whose work was to procure brides, showed them twelve acres of prime mountain land, which, he said, the potential bridegroom intended to purchase upon his return from America. There were peach and persimmon trees there, and slender, tall cedars, and a beautiful new home with three rock gardens. And finally, he pointed out, Fujiko wanted to go: she was young, nineteen, and wished to see something of the world beyond the sea before settling into her married life.

  But she had been sick all the way across the ocean, prostrate, clench bellied, and vomiting. And once in the new country, arriving in Seattle, she found she had married a pauper. Hisao’s fingers were callused and sun blistered, and his clothing smelled powerfully of field sweat. He had nothing, it turned out, but a few dollars and coins, for which he begged Fujiko’s forgiveness. At first they lived in a Beacon Hill boardinghouse where the walls were plastered with pictures from magazines and where the white people on the streets outside treated them with humiliating disdain. Fujiko went to work in a waterfront cookhouse. She, too, sweated beneath her clothes and cut her palms and knuckles working for the hakujin.

  Hatsue was born, the first of five daughters, and the family moved to a Jackson Street boardinghouse. It was owned by people from Tochigiken prefecture who had done astoundingly well for themselves: the women among them wore silk crepe kimonos and scarlet, cork-soled slippers. Jackson Street, though, smelled of rotting fish, cabbages and radishes fermenting in sea brine, sluggish sewers and diesel streetcar fumes. Fujiko cleaned rooms there for three years, until one day Hisao came home with the news that he had procured jobs for them with the National Cannery Company. In May the Imadas boarded a boat for San Piedro, where there was work to be had in the many strawberry fields.

  It was hard work, though – Hatsue and her sisters would do a lot of it in their lives – stoop labor performed in the direct sun. But despite that it was infinitely better than Seattle: the neat rows of strawberries flowed up and down the valleys, the wind brought the smell of the sea to their nostrils, and in the morning the gray light evoked something of the Japan Hisao and Fujiko had left behind.

  At first they lived in the corner of a bam they shared with an Indian family. Hatsue, at seven, cut ferns in the forest and pruned holly trees beside her mother. Hisao sold perch and made Christmas wreaths. They filled a grain sack with coins and bills, leased seven acres of stumps and vine maple, purchased a plow horse, and started clearing. Autumn came, the maple leaves curled into fists and dropped away, and the rain ground them into an auburn paste. Hisao burned piles and pried stumps from the earth in the winter of 1931. A house of cedar slats went up slowly. The land was tilled and the first crop planted in time for the pale light of spring.

  Hatsue grew up digging clams at South Beach, picking blackberries, collecting mushrooms, and weeding strawberry plants. She was mother, too, to four sisters. When she was ten a neighborhood boy taught her how to swim and offered her the use of his glass-bottomed box so that she could look beneath the surface of the waves. The two of them clung to it, their backs warmed by the Pacific sun, and together watched starfish and rock crabs. The water evaporated against Hatsue’s skin, leaving a residue of salt behind. Finally, one day, the boy kissed her. He asked if he might, and she said nothing either way, and then he leaned across the box and put his lips on hers for no more than a second. She smelled the warm, salty interior of his mouth before this boy pulled away and blinked at her. Then they went on looking through the glass at anemones, sea cucumbers, and tube worms. Hatsue would remember on the day of her wedding that her first kiss had been from this boy, Ishmael Chambers, while they clung to a glass box and floated in the ocean. But when her husband asked if she had kissed anyone before, Hatsue had answered never.

  ‘It’s coming down hard,’ she said to him now, lifting her eyes to the courtroom windows. ‘A big snow. Your son’s first.’

  Kabuo turned to take in the snowfall, and she noticed the thick sinews in the left side of his neck above where his shirt was buttoned. He had not lost any of his strength in jail; his strength, as she understood it, was an inward matter, something he tuned silently to the conditions of life: in his cell he had composed himself to preserve it.

  ‘Check the root cellar, Hatsue,’ he said. ‘You don’t want anything to freeze.’

  ‘I’ve been checking,’ she answered. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kabuo. ‘I knew you would.’

  He watched the snow for a silent moment, the needles of it blurring past the leaded panes, then turned again to look at her. ‘Do you remember that snow at Manzanar?’ he said. ‘Whenever it snows I think of that. The drifts and the big wind and the potbellied stove. And the starlight coming through the window.’

  It was not the sort of thing he would normally have said to her, these romantic words. But perhaps jail had taught him to release what otherwise he might conceal. ‘That was jail, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘There were good things, but that was jail.’

  ‘It wasn’t jail,’ Kabuo told her. ‘We thought it was back then because we didn’t know any better. But it wasn’t jail.’

  She knew, as he spoke, that this was true. They’d been married at the Manzanar internment camp in a tar paper Buddhist chapel. Her mother had hung woolen army blankets to divide the Imadas’ cramped room in half and had given them, on their wedding night, two cots adjacent to the stove. She had even pushed the cots together to form one bed and smoothed their sheets with her palms. Hatsue’s sisters – all four of them – had stood beside the curtain watching while their mother went about her silent business. Fujiko loaded coal into the potbellied stove and wiped her hands on her apron. She nodded and said they should close the damper when forty-five minutes had gone by. Then she took her daughters out with her and left Hatsue and Kabuo behind.

  They stood beside the window in their wedding clothes and kissed, and she smelled his warm neck and throat. Outside snow had drifted against the barracks wall. ‘They’ll hear everything,’ Hatsue whispered.

  Kabuo, his hands at her waist, turned and spoke to the curtain. ‘There must be something good on the radio,’ he called. ‘Wouldn’t some music be nice?’

  They waited. Kabuo hung his coat on a peg. In a little while a station from Las Vegas came on – country-and-western music. Kabuo sat down and removed his shoes and socks. He put them under the bed neatly. He unknotted his bow tie.

  Hatsue sat down beside him. She looked at the side of his face for a moment, at the scar on his jaw,
and then they kissed. ‘I need help with my dress,’ she whispered. ‘It unhooks in the back, Kabuo.’

  Kabuo unclasped it for her. He ran his fingers along her spine. She stood and pulled the dress from her shoulders. It dropped to the floor, and she picked it up and hung it on the peg beside his coat.

  Hatsue came back to the bed in her bra and slip and sat down beside Kabuo.

  ‘I don’t want to make a lot of noise,’ she said. ‘Even with the radio. My sisters are listening.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Kabuo. ‘Quietly.’

  He unbuttoned his shirt, stripped it off, and set it on the end of the cot. He pulled his undershirt off. He was very strong. She could see the muscles flowing in his abdomen. She was glad to have married him. He, too, came from strawberry farmers. He was good with the plants and knew which runners to cut. His hands, like hers, were berry stained in the summer months. The red fruit mingled with his skin and scented it. She knew that in part because of this smell she wanted to tie her life to his; it was something she understood in her nose, finally, as odd as that might seem to others. And she knew that Kabuo wanted what she wanted, a San Piedro strawberry farm. That was all, there was nothing more than that, they wanted their farm and the closeness at hand of the people they loved and the scent of strawberries outside their window. There were girls Hatsue’s age she knew very well who felt certain their happiness was something other, who wanted to go to Seattle or Los Angeles. They could not say in any precise way exactly what it was they sought in the city, only that they wanted to go there. It was something Hatsue herself had once felt but had since emerged from as if from a dream, discovering the truth of her private nature: it was in her to have the composure and tranquillity of an island strawberry farmer. She knew in her bones what she wanted, and she knew why she wanted it, too. She understood the happiness of a place where the work was clear and there were fields she could enter into with a man she loved purposefully. And this was what Kabuo felt, too, and what he wanted from life. And so they made plans together. When the war was over they would return to San Piedro. Kabuo was rooted there just as she was, a boy who understood the earth and the working of it and how it was a good thing to live among people one loved. He was precisely the boy Mrs. Shigemura had described for her so many years ago when she’d spoken of love and marriage, and now she kissed him, hard, because of that. She kissed his jaw and forehead more softly, and then she put her chin against the top of his head and held his ears between her fingers. His hair smelled like wet earth. Kabuo put his hands against her back and pulled her deeply to him. He kissed the skin just over her breasts and put his nose against her bra.

  ‘You smell so good,’ he said.

  He drew away and stripped his pants off and laid them next to his shirt. They sat there beside each other in their underwear. His legs shone in the light from the window. She could see beneath the fabric of his underpants how his penis stood erect. The end of it pushed his shorts into the air.

  Hatsue brought her feet up onto the bed and propped her chin on her knees. They’re listening,’ she said. ‘I know they are.’

  ‘Could you turn the radio up?’ Kabuo called. ‘We can’t hear it so well in here.’

  The country-and-western music grew louder. And they were very quiet at first. They lay on their sides and faced one another, and she felt his hardness against her belly. She reached down and touched it beneath the fabric of his shorts, the tip of it and the ridge just below. She could hear the coal burning in the potbellied stove.

  She remembered how she had kissed Ishmael Chambers, clinging to that wooden box. He was a brown-skinned boy who lived down the road – they’d picked blackberries, climbed trees, fished for perch. She thought of him while Kabuo kissed the undersides of her breasts, and then her nipples through the fabric of her bra, and she recognized Ishmael as the beginning of a chain, that she had kissed a boy when she was ten years old, had even then felt something strange, and that tonight, soon, she would feel another boy’s hardness deep inside of her. But it was not difficult for her, on her wedding night, to then cast Ishmael out of her mind completely; he had only crept in by accident, as it were, because all romantic moments are associated willy-nilly – even when some are long dead.

  In a little while her husband took off her slip and underpants and unhooked her bra, and she pulled down his shorts. They were naked, and she could see his face in the starlight from the window. It was a good face, strong and smooth. The wind was blowing hard outside now, and the sound of it whistled between the boards. She put her hand around Kabuo’s hardness and squeezed it, and it pulsed once in her hand. Then, because she wanted it this way, she fell onto her back without letting go, and he was on top of her with his hands on her buttocks.

  ‘Have you ever done this before?’ he whispered.

  ‘Never,’ answered Hatsue. ‘You’re my only.’

  The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a moment he waited there, poised, and kissed her – he took her lower lip between his lips and gently held it there. Then with his hands he pulled her to him and at the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum slap against her skin. Her entire body felt the tightness of it, her entire body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her shoulder blades – her breasts pressed themselves against his chest – and a slow shudder ran through her.

  ‘It’s right,’ she remembered whispering. ‘It feels so right, Kabuo.’

  ‘Tadaima aware ga wakatta,’ he had answered. ‘I understand just now the deepest beauty.’

  Eight days later he left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where he joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He had to go to the war, he told her. It was necessary in order to demonstrate his bravery. It was necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the United States: his country.

  ‘You can die demonstrating all of that,’ she told him. ‘I know you are brave and loyal.’

  He went despite these words of hers. She had spoken them many times before their wedding, often she’d urged him not to go, but he had not been able to bring himself to stay away from the fighting. It was not only a point of honor, he’d said, it was also a matter of having to go because his face was Japanese. There was something extra that had to be proved, a burden this particular war placed on him, and if he would not carry it, who would? She saw that in this he would not be swayed and recognized the hardness buried in him, the part of her husband that was attracted to the fighting and wanted to enter it desperately. There was a place in him she could not reach where he made his choices in solitude, and this made her not only uneasy about him but afraid for their future, too. Her life was joined to his now, and it seemed to her that every corner of his soul should be opened to hers because of this. It was the , war, she persistently told herself, it was the prison of camp life, the pressures of the times, their exile from home, that explained his distance. Many men were going off to the war against the wishes of women, a lot of them leaving the camp each day, droves of young men going. She told herself she must endure it in the way her mother and Kabuo’s mother counseled her and not struggle against those larger forces that could not be struggled against. She was in the stream of history now, as her mother before her had been. She must travel in it easily or her own heart would devour her and she would not endure the war unwounded, as she still hoped to do.

  Hatsue settled into missing her husband and learned the art of waiting over an extended period of time – a deliberately controlled hysteria that was something like what Ishmael Chambers felt watching her in the courtroom.

  8

  Ishmael Chambers, watching Hatsue, remembered digging geoduck dams with her below the bluff at South Beach. Hatsue, carrying a garden shovel and a metal pail rusted through in its bottom, dripped water behind her as she walked the tide flats; she was fourteen and wore a black bathing suit. She went barefoot, avoiding barnacles, picking her way along the flats with the tide drawn out and the salt chuck grass sleek against the mud in sun-dried fans. Ishmael wore rubber boots and clutche
d a gardener’s hand spade; the sun struck his shoulders and back as he walked and dried the mud on his knees and hands.

  They wandered for nearly a mile. They stopped to swim. At the turning of the tide the geoducks emerged, shooting jets of water like miniature geysers hidden among the eelgrass. Down the mud flats small fountains erupted, dozens of them, spurting two feet or more, then again, then lower, then dwindling and stopping. The geoducks raised their necks from the mud and aimed their lips at the sun. The siphons at the ends of their necks glistened. They blossomed delicately white and iridescent out of the tidal morass.

  The two of them knelt beside a dam siphon to discuss the particulars of its appearance. They were quiet and made no sudden movements – movement inspired shyness among clams and encouraged them to withdraw. Hatsue, her bucket beside her, her shovel in one hand, pointed out the darkness of the exposed clam’s lip, its size, its hue and tone, the circumference of its watery dimple. She decided they’d stopped beside a horse clam.

  They were fourteen years old; geoducks were important. It was summer and little else really mattered.

  They came to a second siphon and knelt again. Hatsue, sitting on her ankles, twisted the salt water out of her hair so that it dripped along her arm. She lofted her hair out neatly behind her and let it spread against her back to catch the sun.