Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
Description (from Goodreads):
San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man’s guilt. For on San Piedro, memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo’s wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
My review:
Snow Falling on Cedars, first published in 1994, is a historical novel, mystery, police procedural, and courtroom drama. The story follows a small cast of island residents, white and Japanese-American, from their childhood and teen years in the 1930s and on to their experiences in World War II, then to adulthood in the early 1950s, as they rebuild their lives in the wake of the war. The present setting of the novel is 1954, when the body of Carl Heine, one of the story’s small cast, is found tangled in his fishing trawler’s net; the investigation, accusations, and trial that follows; and its resolution. It is not, as are many of the banned books I read and review, a “young adult” novel, but in bringing to life a shameful and often suppressed chapter in American history, it’s often assigned and discussed in high school English classes, and is popular with young readers.
Although it does not appear on the current (2010-2019) American Library Association’s top 100 most frequently challenged books list, it did register as the 33rd most challenged and banned book on the ALA’s 2000-2009 list. Some of the more prominent challenges and bans:
- Washington, 1997: challenged in Snohomish School District by parents who acknowledged literary value but complained about sexual content and language inappropriate for high school students
- Texas, 1999: removed from classrooms and a library in Boerne Independent High School because of depictions of violence, sex, and racial bigotry; later returned
- Washington, 2001: South Kitsap parents claimed the book was pornography; the school board, acknowledging that it did contain sexual content and profanity, banned the book
- California, 2003: challenged but retained in Modesto for sexual content and scenes of war
- Ontario, Canada, 2007: Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board removed the book from shelves and reading lists pending review due to an anonymous complaint via letter about sexual content and language
- Idaho, 2007: one of five books challenged in Coeur d’Alene School District for sexual references
- Washington, 2011: challenged but retained in college-level classes at Richland high schools
The novel’s literary value is unchallenged (save for the dirty-minded South Kitsap parents who could see only the sex stuff) but it does indeed address sex, appropriate to the novel’s characters and the context in which it occurs. There are frank and sometimes graphic depictions of teen and adult sex, and some characters experience sexual self-doubt and frustration. Sexual desire and jealousy motivate the actions of certain key characters (although on the whole the novel’s characters are primarily concerned with providing for themselves and their families … Snow Falling on Cedars, while an adult novel, is in no way a sex novel).
Tellingly, two of the challenges mentioned above cited the novel’s exploration of racial bigotry and its graphic depiction of war. Again and again, in studying book banning and reviewing banned books, I see news reports of parents challenging books and calling for their banning because the books address painful subjects that reflect poorly on white people and/or American history: racial prejudice, slavery, the treatment of indigenous people … here, specifically, the internment of Japanese-American citizens in WWII. In my opinion, discomfort with the seamier side of Americans and America is at least as much a motivator for book-banners as sexual content (which they often use as cover for what they really want to suppress).
I picked up Snow Falling on Cedars because it has a long history of being challenged and banned. I stayed with it because it’s an outstanding read, a solid four of five stars on my personal scale. The descriptions of the fictional island in Puget Sound, its agricultural and seafaring economy, the fog and snow and ice that beset its residents as the trial nears its climax, are vividly real, as are the war scenes in the Pacific and Europe. The characters are even more so. The mood of a small community that only a few years before stood by, some inwardly disturbed but others openly cheering, as their Japanese-American neighbors and employees were rounded up and sent to internment camps, and is still in the process of learning to live with them (and themselves) now that they’ve returned to pick up their lives and livelihoods again … I’m willing to bet David Guterson got it right. He has built a believable world, one most readers will find themselves immersed in.