Snow Falling on Cedars

Snow Falling on Cedars is a novel by the American writer David Guterson, published in 1994. Guterson was a teacher, and he wrote it in the early morning hours over ten years before he left teaching to write full time.

It is set on the invented San Piedro Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, north of Puget Sound, in 1954. The case at the centre of it is the death of Carl Heine, a respected fisherman whose body was pulled from the sea, trapped in his own net, with his water-damaged watch stopped at 1:47. Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, is accused of killing him.

The trial takes place in December, during a snowstorm that grips the whole island, and it takes place in the middle of strong anti-Japanese feeling left over from the war and from the internment camps. Much of what the reader learns about the people involved comes in flashbacks that go back over the decades before.

The case is covered for the island's one-man newspaper, the San Piedro Review, by its editor Ishmael Chambers, a marine veteran who lost an arm at the Battle of Tarawa. The novel follows what he does with what he knows, and with what he feels about the accused man's wife.