Snow Falling on Cedars

Summary

Snow Falling on Cedars follows the complex relationships between Kabuyo Miyamoto, Hatsue Imada and Ishmael Chambers. In doing so, the novel weaves together themes of love, prejudice, and the lingering effects of World War II, as it explores the trial of a Japanese-American man accused of murder.

The story opens with the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese-American fisherman accused of murdering Carl Heine, a fellow fisherman. Carl's body was found tangled in his fishing nets, and Kabuo is suspected due to circumstantial evidence and long-standing tensions over land ownership. He is married to Hatsue Imada, who used to be the girlfriend and lover of Ishmael Chambers.

The trial serves as the central narrative around which the novel's flashbacks and the characters histories unfold. Through Ishmael's perspective, the novel reveals his lingering bitterness and unrequited love for Hatsue, as well as his struggle with the racism and prejudice that pervade the island community.

Ishmael discovers evidence that could exonerate Kabuo. Weather records and testimony reveal that Carl's death was likely an accident caused by a storm, rather than foul play. However, Ishmael faces a dilemma about whether to present this evidence, as it would require confronting his still lingering feelings towards Hatsue. He wants to still be with her, and constructs a version of the future where the two of them could be together because her husband is in prison.

This idea of building a relationship on a lie, and doing the wrong thing is obviously stupid from the outside. But unrequited love is a strong feeling and it makes people consider (and often do) very stupid things. The doomed romance between Ishmael and Hatsue reflects these themes of love, longing, and the pain of unfulfilled desires and how it often muddles our reasoning and what we want to do.

Ultimately, Ishmael chooses to do the right thing though, confronting his past, knowing that now things are different, that Hatsue loves somebody else and that he should not interfere with this. He reveals the evidence and thus helps to secure Kabuo's acquittal. In doing this, he finds solace and can move on from his past relationship with Hatsue, even if that breaks his heart one last time. His decision reflects his growth as a character and his willingness to confront his personal flaws, of which there are still many left, because the war has left him with a broken mind.

To me this book was very influential, because when I read it I struggled with my own case of unrequited love. You know, it is weird to see, how closely somebody writing a novel can describe what we feel inside. This to me is something that makes reading good novels so powerful. They can capture something about our internal worlds and transmit it to other people. We know how they must have felt at some point because they captured their emotions in words. This, is powerful. It shows how we are similar enough to understand one another. And yet, as the novel illucidates, we have inherent racism, violent injustice, and societal problems, that exist besides our ability to empathize with each other.

Detailed Notes

The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense.

How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love's illusion. And yet-on the other hand-what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt...

I know you'll think this is crazy, but all I want to do is hold you, and I think that if you'll let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away, and never speak to you again.

Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.

[Ishmael] listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here, he had no place in the tree any longer. Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.

Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we're safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is.

He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.

At the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world.

Who was she to say how she felt? What she felt remained a mystery, she felt a thousand things at once, she could not unravel the thread of her feelings with enough certainty to speak with any accuracy.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it.