In graduate school, I encountered an especially insightful critical study, Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, the Text, the Poem. She posited that revisiting a text at a later time in a reader’s life would elicit a different interpretation because of the reader’s interim experiences and understanding. Her premise has proved true even if sometimes the poem proves to have much less import than it did at the first reading. Snow Falling on Cedars, published in 1994, unlike many texts, has an even stronger message than when first encountered.
Snow Falling on Cedars centers on the trial of Japanese American Kabuo Miyamoto for murdering Carl Heine on Carl’s boat, the Susan Marie, during the night of 16 September 1954. Art Moran, the county sheriff, and his deputy, twenty-four-year-old Abel Martinson, find Heine, a gill-netter for salmon, caught in the net of his drifting boat on Puget Sound with his skull crushed above the left ear. While searching the boat, they find an extra battery. They decide to search Miyamoto’s boat, and after finding a battery and a rope like Carl’s, Moran decides that Miyamoto has murdered Carl although the fishermen never boarded each other’s boats except in emergencies. Without any other evidence, Moran jails Miyamoto, a U.S. Army World War II veteran.
The December 6, 1954, trial (nearly three months after Miyamoto has been incarcerated), begins during a severe snow storm. Nels Gudmundson, seventy-nine, almost blind and suffering from neurasthenia, serves as Miyamoto’s lawyer. The prosecutor, Alvin Hooks, represents the townspeople. David Guterson’s use of omniscient point of view enables the reader to learn how the witnesses feel about Miyamoto, Heine, and the alleged crime. The educated Ishmael Chambers, a local reporter who went to school with Miyamoto’s wife Hatsue, provides much of the backstory description, including his secret high-school relationship with Hatsue.
As the witnesses appear on the stand, they disclose their prejudices. The coroner Horace Whaley comments to Art, that “if he were inclined to play Sherlock Holmes he ought to start looking for a Jap with a bloody gun butt—a right-handed Jap, to be precise.” This jest reminds Art that Miyamoto is a kendo expert. The gash over Carl’s ear reminds Whaley of the war, and he says, “The Japanese soldier, trained in the art of kendo, or stick fighting, was exceptionally
proficient at killing in this manner.” Whaley also recalls that many Japanese hit their victims above the left ear with their right hands. But Carl died from drowning, and Nels notes that Carl could not have died of a head wound because the coroner said Carl was still breathing underwater. Ishmael reports that Miyamoto kept a “detached and aloof manner,” something that the jury would note. But Whaley also remembers that Carl seemed to have few friends and, although polite, always worked by himself.
Throughout the trial, people continue to judge Miyamoto on his past actions and his present demeanor. The jury learns that Carl and Miyamoto were best friends during school but that animosity between them began during World War II when Miyamoto’s famiIy had to go to Manzabar. Carl’s mother, who hated the Japanese, quickly sells land the Miyamotos were buying from Carl’s father at a profit after his death, blaming them for missing their last two payments. When the buyer Ole Jurgensen decides to sell, Carl quickly negotiates with him before Miyamoto has the opportunity. That action would give Miyamoto a motive for murdering Carl, according to observers. Because his parents have taught him to hide his emotions, Miyamoto seems distanced from the trial’s proceedings.
But Miyamoto reveals to the reader that he feels he must suffer for the men he killed during the war. As a Buddhist subject to the laws of karma, he expects to receive the death penalty even though he did not commit the murder. Because Miyamoto trained to be a good soldier (his great grandfather had been a samurai) by learning kendo from his father, he is condemned instead of praised for his skill. During the trial, that Art Moran arrested him on circumstantial evidence involving his past rather than the present becomes clear. Miyamoto told of going aboard Carl’s boat “dead in the water” and helping him with his battery. Carl had told him that he would sell the land to him, and Miyamoto had no reason to murder him. When asked why he hadn’t given that information initially, Miyamoto said that he had not been given the opportunity.
Nels Gudmunsson, the old lawyer, concludes his remarks to the jury, “What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. . . . Will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless time and in the face of it be truly human? in God’s name, in the name of humanity, do your duty as jurors.”
While the jury deliberates during the late-day power outage, Ishmael stops at the Point White lighthouse station which has power. He finds a report that an enormous freighter came through the fishing grounds on September 16, a night with intense fog, at 1:42, but went unnoticed because the two men on duty transferred from the station the next day. Carl’s watch had stopped at 1:47. When Ishmael finally goes to the judge the next day with the information, the judge frees Miyamoto. This legal jury would have never released him without Ishmael’s discovery.
The Japanese had lived on San Piedro Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, north of Puget Sound, since 1883, but their neighbors betrayed them after Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. By March, Hatsue and her family were interned at Manzabar, and there she realized that she could never marry Ishmael, her teenage love. She wrote him and “confessed to experiencing a moral anguish over meeting him so secretly and deceiving her mother and father.” Hatsue’s mother had taught her Japanese beliefs. “The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. We Japanese, on the other hand . . . understand that by ourselves, alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind.” Ishmael illustrates the difference because he focuses on himself after he goes to war and loses his arm. “It seemed . . . that the world was thoroughly altered. . . . People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were
only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids. He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people.” He is self-conscious about his missing arm and thinks “that his existence in the world made others nervous.” At the trial, Hatsue asks for Ishmael’s help, but when he finds the truth that will free Miyamoto, he almost refuses to reveal it. But he soon realizes that he could not live with himself or with Hatsue if he neglected to free her husband from prejudice and false accusation. He remembers that his reporter father, when alive, “hoped for the best from his fellow islanders . . . and trusted God to guide their hearts, though he knew them to be vulnerable to hate.” While Ishmael writes his newspaper article about the trial, he understands “that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.” Trials, supposedly based on law, are sometimes unfair. He understands that “the heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious.” People are the judges and the juries of other humans, and their attitudes, formed as children, often taint their decisions. Too many times, people retain membership in an anonymous mob that judges only by religion, gender, or race.
In 2025, attitudes, situations, and judgments prevalent in 1994, are the same—if not more—pronounced.
