Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  And perhaps after a while he took his other kerosene lantern and picked out the five-eighths wrench from his toolbox to tighten the alternator pulley belts, cursing again just under his breath: how was it possible he’d neglected this, failed to check it as a matter of course, come to such a pass as his present one (which ordinary seamanship might have prevented), and he a man who prided himself silently on the depth and purity of his seamanship? He tightened the belts, pressed his thumb against them, then went out once again and stood leaning against the port gunnel. Carl Heine listened to the fog and to the sea, to the other boats moving off the bank with their whistles sounding incessantly and to the water softly lapping against his boat as he drifted with the tide, moving east. He stood with one foot up, the kerosene lantern handy, the air horn clutched in his hand. Something in him would not use the horn, and for a good long time, an hour or more, he debated whether he should use it anyway, and he wondered if there were fish in his net. It was then that he heard a boat not far off, the sound of a foghorn blown deliberately, and he turned his ear in its direction. Six times it came, nearer at each blast, and with his watch he timed the precision of its intervals – one minute went by between each. When it drew inside of one hundred yards he gave a single blast on his air horn.

  The Islander, her hold full of fish, and the Susan Marie, dark and dead on the water – a kerosene lantern lashed to her mast, her skipper poised in her bow with his chin set – came together in the fog. Then Kabuo’s mooring lines were made fast to deck cleats in the efficiently wrought half hitches Carl Heine could lay out with no thought or hesitation. A battery changed hands, it was somewhat too large, a metal flange was beaten back. Carl’s hand was sliced down the palm, there was blood on Kabuo’s fishing gaff. An agreement was arrived at eventually. The things that needed to be said were said between them, and Kabuo pushed off into the night.

  Maybe it had seemed to Kabuo Miyamoto, alone on the sea shortly afterward, a fortuitous thing to have come across Carl Heine in circumstances such as these. Perhaps it had seemed just the sort of luck he’d long thought he needed. His dream, after all, was close to him now, so close that while he fished he must have imagined it: his strawberry land, the fragrance of fruit, the fold of the fields, the early-summer ripening, his children, Hatsue, his happiness. Oldest son of the Miyamotos, great-grandson of a samurai, and the first of his lineage to become an American in name, place, and heart, he had not given up on being who he was; he had never given up on his family’s land or the claim they had to it by all that was right, the human claim that was bigger than hate or war or any smallness or enmity.

  And all the while he was thinking this way, celebrating this sudden good fortune in his life and imagining the fragrance of ripening strawberries, he was drifting in the darkness, drifting in fog, with the low moan from the lighthouse barely audible and the steam whistle blasts from the S.S. Corona growing louder and coming closer with each moment. And a half mile to the south and west of the Islander Carl Heine stood in his cabin door and listened uncertainly to the same whistle blasts now penetrating through the fog. He had made black coffee and held his cup in one hand; the kettle had been stowed in its place. His net was out and running true behind as far as he could tell. All of his lights were burning strong now. His volt meter showed thirteen and a half volts charging, and the Susan Marie ran hard and steady, her spotlight suffused in the fog. It was twenty minutes before two o’clock in the morning, enough time left to catch plenty of fish – the coffee would keep him awake long enough to fill his hold with salmon.

  Surely Carl had listened to his radio, the lighthouse radioman dispensing advice, the freighter’s navigator calling in positions, taking readings off Lanheedron Island, then suddenly deciding on a bisecting dogleg right through Ship Channel Bank. Carl had tried listening into the fog, but the thrum of his own engines masked all other sound, and he had to shut down and drift. He stood again listening and waiting. At last there came another steam whistle blast, closer this time, definitely drawing closer, and he slammed his coffee cup to the table. He went outside then and considered getting hard waked, the big swell from the freighter going right through him, and it seemed to him he was secure to take it, there was nothing to get bounced around very much, everything was in its place.

  Except the lantern lashed to the mast. A big freighter wake would smash it to pieces; Carl would have seen it that way.

  And so he paid for his fastidious nature, his compulsion to keep things perfect. He paid because he had inherited from his mother a certain tightness through the purse strings. Drifting on the water, the Corona bearing down on him in the fogbound night, he figured he needed less than thirty seconds to haul himself up his mast. Save a lantern that way. What were the risks? Does a man ever believe in his own imminent death or in the possibility of accident?

  And so because he was who he was – his mother’s son, tidy by nature, survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Canton and thus immune to a fishing boat accident – he climbed his mast with confidence. He climbed it and in so doing opened the palm wound he’d incurred banging against the battery well’s metal flange with Kabuo Miyamoto’s fishing gaff. Now he hung by his armpit from the cross spar, bleeding and listening into the fog, working his knife from its sheath. Again there came the blast of the freighter’s whistle, the low hum of its engines audible to port, so close he twitched in surprise at it, and then with his blade he exerted pressure through the figure-eight lashings he’d made a few hours earlier. Carl came away with the lantern’s handle between his fingers and went to lock back his knife.

  It must have been that in the ghost fog that night he never saw the wall of water the Corona threw at him. The sea rose up from behind the fog and welled underneath the Susan Marie so that the coffee cup on the cabin table fell to the floor, and the angle of deflection high up the mast was enough to jar loose the astonished man who hung there not grasping the nature of what was happening, and still he did not foresee his death. His bloody hand lost its grip on the mast, the rubber of his overalls ceased to grip, his arms flew out and his fingers opened, casting the lantern and the knife into the water, and Carl Heine fell swift and hard against the Susan Marie’s port gunnel. His head cracked open above the left ear and then he slid heavily beneath the waves, water seeping into his wristwatch, stopping it at 1:47. The Susan Marie rocked a full five minutes and while gradually she settled once again the body of her skipper settled, too, into his salmon net. He hung there in the phosphorescence of the sea, gathering light and undulating, and his boat moved now on the tidal current, brightly lit and silent in the fog.

  The wall of water moved on. It traveled a half mile speedily and then gathered beneath the Islander so that Kabuo felt it, too. It traveled with nothing more to interrupt it and broke against the shore of Lanheedron Island just before two o’clock in the morning. The whistle of the freighter and the lighthouse diaphone sounded again in the fog. Kabuo Miyamoto, his net set, his radio off, the fog as palpable as cotton around him, replaced the line he’d left on Carl’s boat with a reserve he kept stowed in his galley. Perhaps he’d squatted for a moment, building a bowline into the manila, and heard the steam whistle of the passing freighter sounding low across the water. It would have been as sorrowful a sound in that heavy fog as anyone could readily conjure or imagine, and as it grew louder – as the freighter drew closer – it would have sounded all the more forlorn. The freighter passed to the north still blowing, and Kabuo listened to it. Perhaps in that moment he remembered how his father had buried everything Japanese beneath the soil of his farm. Or perhaps he thought of Hatsue and of his children and the strawberry farm he would one day pass to them.

  The steam whistle from the freighter faded eastward. It sounded at intervals with the fog whistle from the lighthouse, a higher note, more desolate. The fog closed it in, muffling it, and the freighter’s note went deep enough so that it seemed otherworldly, not a steam whistle but a cacophony of bass notes rising from the bottom of the sea. F
inally it merged with the lighthouse signal so that the two of them sounded at the same moment, a clash of sound, discordant. There was a dissonance, faint, every two minutes across the water, and finally even that disappeared.

  Kabuo Miyamoto came home to embrace his wife and to tell her how their lives had changed; the lighthouse dogwatch drew to a close, and Philip Milholland stuffed his notes into a folder and threw himself into sleep. He and the radioman, Robert Miller, slept steadily into the afternoon. Then they awoke and left San Piedro Island, transferred to another station. And Art Moran made his arrest.

  Well, thought Ishmael, bending over his typewriter, his fingertips poised just above the keys: the palpitations of Kabuo Miyamoto’s heart were unknowable finally. And Hatsue’s heart wasn’t knowable, either, nor was Carl Heine’s. The heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious.

  Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

  DAVID GUTERSON

  Snow Falling on Cedars

  A READING GUIDE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In brief

  On a small bleak island off the north-west coast of America, Kabuo Miyamoto, a much-decorated Japanese-American war veteran, stands trial, accused of the murder of his fellow fisherman, Carl Heine. As the evidence unfolds so the prejudice which has become entrenched since Pearl Harbor threatens to overshadow the proceedings until one man discovers a crucial piece of evidence.

  In detail

  Snow Falling on Cedars combines the nail-biting tension of a courtroom drama with a searching exploration of racial prejudice and the potentially explosive effects of murder on a small community. David Guterson interweaves courtroom scenes with flashbacks, carefully constructing the evidence presented at the trial against a backdrop of the small, constricted world of San Piedro.

  Carl Heine has been found dead, caught in his own fishing nets. A post-mortem reveals a head wound and the coroner’s comment on its resemblance to wounds he has seen inflicted by the Japanese during the Second World War sets in train an investigation which leads to the arrest of Carl’s fellow fisherman and old school friend, Kabuo Miyamoto.

  There has been a sizeable Japanese community on San Piedro for many years. Generally considered hard-working, the Japanese had been tolerated if not accepted, but since the attack on Pearl Harbor attitudes have hardened on both sides. The Japanese were forced to endure the humiliation and deprivation of internment while many of the Americans have witnessed the horrors of a war in which ‘Japs’ were the enemy. Kabuo belongs to the first generation of Japanese-American citizens, a decorated war veteran who has witnessed his own horrors.

  As the evidence for both prosecution and defence is presented, Ishmael Chambers looks on with ambivalence. Living a life of self-imposed solitude, Ishmael is haunted by his own demons. A war veteran who lost his arm during a fierce battle with the Japanese, Ishmael is still deeply wounded by the end of his adolescent love affair with Hatsue, now Kabuo’s wife. When he comes across a crucial piece of evidence that will both change the course of the trial and put paid to any lingering dreams of happiness with Hatsue, he is plunged into an agonising moral dilemma.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Guterson was born in Seattle in 1956, the son of a distinguished criminal defence lawyer. He studied at the University of Washington and later taught English on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound off the north-west coast of America. Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson’s first novel, met with great critical acclaim on publication and went on to become an international bestseller. In 1999 the book was made into a film starring Ethan Hawke as Ishmael Chambers.

  FOR DISCUSSION

  – Snow Falling on Cedars has been described by one critic as a ‘glorious whodunnit’. How important was the element of suspense in your reading of the book? Were you convinced of Kabuo’s innocence or guilt, or did you find yourself wavering and, if so, why? Would you describe the book as a whodunnit?

  – Throughout the book scenes from the trial are interspersed with flashbacks, complete with the sometimes intimate details of various characters’ lives. How effective did you find this structure?

  – The novel is set during the worst storm that San Piedro has known for many years. What part does nature play in the development of the plot and as a metaphor?

  – Racial prejudice is a major theme running through the novel. How do the white Americans view the Japanese and what is the basis for their views? How do the Japanese-Americans view the white islanders? Hostile attitudes towards the Japanese have been exacerbated by the war and yet there are many Germans, including Carl, who continue to be accepted in the community. Why do you think the two races are treated differently?

  – On San Piedro ‘the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man’ (page 33). Carl epitomises these qualities but to what extent can they also be applied to Kabuo? Which other ‘good’ men in the book do not fit this ‘collective image’?

  – How similar are Carl and Kabuo? Could they be described as friends, enemies or something else? What difference has the war made to their lives and to their feelings for each other? How have other characters in the book been changed by their experiences during the war?

  – On page 179 Hatsue thinks of herself as ‘she was of this place and she was not of this place’. What conflicts do Hatsue and Kabuo face as second-generation immigrants?

  – Ishmael lives his life at a distance from everyone else on San Piedro. How different is he from the other islanders? What are the factors that have brought about his solitude?

  – Ishmael has it in his power to change the course of the trial for some time before he chooses to do so. Why does he finally hand over Philip Milholland’s notes? Why has he held back for so long?

  – Remembering his father, Ishmael calls to mind Arthur’s description of the way in which people who lived on San Piedro ‘held their breath and walked with care, and this made them who they were inside, constricted and small, good neighbours’ (page 385). What has led the people of San Piedro to behave in this way? How well does this description fit the principal characters in the book? Why do you think Guterson chose to set the novel on an island?

  – The novel ends with Ishmael coming to an understanding that ‘accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart’ (page 404). What do you understand by this statement? To what extent do you agree with it?

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  DAVID GUTERSON

  The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

  East of the Mountains

  Our Lady of the Forest

  The Other

  SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

  Island Madness by Tim Binding

  A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

  Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi

  The Raven by Peter Landesman

  Remembering Babylon by David Malouf

  The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

  DAVID GUTERSON’S

  FAVOURITE BOOKS

  Children’s book

  Zlateh the Goat and other Stories, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. There’s an edition that came out in 1966 with pictures by Maurice Sendak, and these pictures make a wonderful addition to the stories, of which there are seven. There are the elders wrinkling their foreheads and tugging at their beards for seven days and nights, trying to make out the meaning of the incidents described in ‘The First Shlemiel’. And there is the moment in the title story when Zlateh says her one word, ‘Maaaa’, and means, ‘We must accept all that God gives us – heat, cold, hunger, satisfaction, light, darkness.’ In his foreword, Singer tells us that ‘in stories time does not vanish’. These stories bear that out.

  Classic

  Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which is so spare and cleanly written, and so haunting, that I read it regularly as an antido
te to myself. This is the sort of book where on every page you think, ‘This is the truth, this cannot be turned away from, this is what I feel, this is life.’ It hurts to read it, but on the other hand, it’s undeniably and exquisitely beautiful.

  Contemporary book

  Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, for its fine but unpretentious prose, its narrative complexity, and its people. I love both the mood and the sensibility of this book. The novel within the novel within the novel pushed ‘reality’ aside for me, except that I couldn’t help imagining, on every page, how ecstatic Atwood must have felt writing them.

  Top 10

  Complete Poems of Robert Frost

  The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa translated by Garma C. C. Chang

  The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

  A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Shantideva

  100 Poems from the Chinese translated by Kenneth Rexroth

  Metamorphoses by Ovid

  Seven Collected Works by Basho

  Two Essays on Analytical Psychology by C. G. Jung

  King Lear by William Shakespeare

  The Dead by James Joyce

  BLOOMSBURY