Reading Snow Falling on Cedars as a Historical (Crime) Novel

In my article I give a reading of David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1995) as a historical novel. The setting of the novel is a fictional island in the Puget Sound outside Seattle, Washington, in 1954. Kabuo Miyamoto, an American fisherman of Japanese descent, has been charged with the murder of another fisherman, Carl Heine, an American of German descent. Although the novel primarily portrays individual destiny and life on San Piedro island, the novel also gives insight into aspects of American culture in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the alleged crime remains a central element of the plot and the structure of the novel, I first compare the structure of the novel with typical crime story formulas. Then I argue that Guterson has succeeded in capturing social forces of the time and giving insight into the causes of tension between European Americans and Japanese Americans. Based on Georg Lukács's work, The Historical Novel, I make the claim that Snow Falling on Cedars can contribute to a better understanding of the social history of the American West, as well as the mechanisms of stereotyping and prejudice in any society. When viewed as a historical novel, the destiny of the Japanese Americans in Snow Falling on Cedars can be seen as reflecting the destiny of Japanese Americans in general. I attempt to prove this by taking a closer look at the history of the Japanese Americans from 1941 until the fight for redress was won in the late 1980s. In the final section of the article I discuss the concept of prejudice in order to focus on the human tendency to stereotype and harbor prejudice. This is in many ways the source of all the "crimes" in Snow Falling on Cedar