David Guterson's 'Snow Falling on Cedars' has a message of hope that still resonates

The KUOW Book Club read David Guterson's Pacific Northwest classic "Snow Falling on Cedars" this month. Guterson joined KUOW's Katie Campbell to talk about the book's impact and enduring message to readers. Listen to their full conversation by hitting the play button above.

Also, spoiler alert of sorts: Although this novel was first published in 1994, if you haven't read it yet or are somewhere in the middle, the conversation that follows reveals some plot elements and outcomes you might not see coming.

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here's a lighthouse at the end of "Snow Falling on Cedars," one that seemed to represent a minor digression in the story.

A Japanese American man, Kabuo Miyamoto, is on trial for allegedly murdering his fellow fisherman, a white man named Carl Heine. A fierce snowstorm pummels their island community while the trial goes on, and during a break, the local reporter, Ishmael Chambers, heads out to the lighthouse to gather some information for a story about the weather. Instead, he finds evidence exonerating Kabuo.

The lighthouse suddenly became a symbol; the light of knowledge in the darkness of ignorance. Kabuo, after all, is largely suspected because of the distrust his white neighbors feel toward people of Japanese descent — even though Kabuo was born in Washington state, is a U.S. citizen, and World War II veteran.

But the author, David Guterson, saw it as more than the light that shines on the farcical case against Kabuo.

"What is a lighthouse other than a human attempt to impose on nature's indifference?" he said when we spoke. "What is a courtroom? Human aspiration to bring justice and sanity to this indifferent world."

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Guterson, who was rather soft-spoken through much of our conversation, got fired up when we started talking about the whims of the universe and humanity struggle to make sense of that at times. He got fired up, he said, because that is what so much of his first novel, a novel that has endured since its publication in 1994, is all about.

"The universe itself is dispassionate with regard to us. What happens is just what happens," he said. "We have no control over that. But what do we have control over? Ourselves. We don't have to make all of this worse by contributing to it with our own behavior."

In Kabuo and Carl's case, the act of nature turned out to be a lost freighter that drifted into the area where Carl was fishing the night he died. The massive ship kicked up such a disturbance in the water that Carl was thrown from his boat and drowned. This accident nearly cost another innocent man his life, because rather than see more evidence of the fall that was clearly on Carl's boat, the local sheriff instead saw evidence he believed pointed to Kabuo.

"It turns out to be an accident, because that's the nature of the universe in which we live," Guterson said. "But it also turns out that a human being — in this case, Ishmael — can conduct himself as such that he doesn't contribute to that and, in fact, sort of fights back against it."

That's where the book really started for Guterson, he said. He didn't really have a story in mind or characters, just a feeling "of the ways in which simply being alive and being human exposes us to tragedy."

"And I always thought, sadly, of how much we make it worse with our own behavior," he added. "Things don't have to be as bad as they are. But we're so full of folly and ignorance and greed that, instead of confronting nature's indifference with wisdom, we just exacerbate the problem."

Ishmael nearly fell victim to his own ignorance, and though he finally triumphs over it and does bring forth the exonerating evidence he found to save Kabuo, that decision was not a given.

He's a WWII veteran who lost his arm in a botched battle with Japanese soldiers. Before that, he lost Hatsue, now Kabuo's wife, who is also Japanese American. She ended their teenage relationship when she and her family were incarcerated in a detention camp, but she'd already begun to realize she didn't really love Ishmael. The breakup was far from mutual, and the pain it caused Ishmael compounded the pain and propaganda of war. He starts to imagine that if he does not turn over the evidence in Kabuo's favor, Hatsue could be his again.

Desperate for a path forward, whatever that may mean for him, Ishmael seeks counsel from his mother. He asks her what he should do, and the readers knows, though she does not, that he's simultaneously asking what to do about the evidence he had in his pocket and the anger he harbors.

What she says in response chilled me. It seemed she, really Guterson, was speaking to a greater human condition.

"It's very hard to get inside the consciousness, the heart and mind of a traumatized war vet," Guterson said when I asked him about this moment with Ishmael's mother. "It's hard to write about war, and it's hard for people to understand what it's like to have gone to war and to return home. It is inexplicable. Now, he's holding on to this evidence, as you mentioned, that would exonerate Kabuo, and he's holding on to it because of his trauma. A part of him just wants to see Kabuo go to prison, get a life sentence, maybe get the death penalty. There's a sort of vindictiveness in that.

"When he goes to speak to his mother, and ultimately returns to his childhood home... he is reminded of the basic values with which he grew up and that he cannot turn away from. If he turns away from those values, he's no longer himself."

When I announced earlier this month the KUOW Book Club would be reading "Snow Falling on Cedars," I heard from several people who expressed how they felt reading this novel at this time was important. Guterson said he understood why.

"At the heart of 'Snow Falling on Cedars' is this great injustice in American history, which was the forced removal of everybody of Japanese descent from the West Coast," he said. "This included a great number of American citizens who were targeted because of their ethnicity. They were visible targets. ... I could see how people see this today, with what's happening with immigration, with people being profiled on the basis of their ethnicity... the same sort of cultural and social impulses at work driving this sort of injustice."

Guterson said his novels are never meant to address a specific moment in time exactly. It's the message, how the folly of man can compound tragedy or relieve it, that he hopes will endure.

It's hard to say what kind of ending "Snow Falling on Cedars" had exactly. I felt a great surge of relief when Kabuo was freed and hoped he and his family would be able to move on. But Carl, who seemed to be a good man himself, was dead, his own young family left to go on without him. Ishmael was still so damaged. And this island where Kabuo had grown up largely had proven itself terribly prejudiced.

There was no epilogue, no cutting to one year later or anything like that, so I asked Guterson what he thought happened to his characters when the trial was over. He said he wasn't sure beyond knowing there would have to be a lot of healing for Ishmael.

I would like to think Ishmael healed, too. And I'd like to think that Kabuo and Hatsue got their strawberry farm, lived a happy life together, and were never bothered again.

I highlighted this passage back at the start of the book, and I'll end with it here, because more than any other I think it captures what I like to imagine for the Miyamotos and those who suffered like them: peace.