Snowbound

By Pico Iyer

"An enemy on an island is an enemy forever," muses one character in David Guterson's luminous first novel. That is another way of saying there are no hiding places on a relatively small island: everyone is forced to be conscious of others and the need to be removed from others. In the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound in the early 1950s, both the residents of Japanese descent and the "American" communities are further divided and shadowed by their recent memories of war.

Snow Falling on Cedars (Harcourt Brace; 345 pages; $21.95), a beautifully assured and full-bodied story, centers on a trial: when the bloody corpse of Carl Heine, a large, well-meaning salmon fisherman, is pulled out of the water one day, suspicion immediately falls on Heine's old friend and recent adversary, Kabuo Miyomoto, a Japanese colleague who has been bidding for some of Heine's property. As Miyomoto sits in the snowbound courtroom, he is watched by his elegant wife Hatsue; she, in turn, is watched by Ishmael Chambers, a young reporter who has been in love with her since boyhood. Meanwhile, all the tensions and suspicions of the island become focused on the little courtroom, its windows rattled by the wind.

Guterson's particular gift is for description: he takes you into one fully researched scene after another -- gill-netters at work, an autopsy, digging for geoduck clams. With equal precision, Guterson traces the shadow lives of Japanese in the Northwest at a time when Americans of Japanese descent were referred to by Census takers as "Jap Number 1 ... laughing Jap, dwarf Jap ... "

Set among the amputees and other casualties of war, in fact, the novel becomes a tender examination of fairness and forgiveness. The "Americans" come to seem as inscrutable as the Japanese, as clannish and as sparing with their feelings. And the divisions between the two are only intensified by their affinities: when the reticent descendants of samurai meet laconic Scandinavian fishermen, one form of silence glances off another.

Toward the end, Guterson describes a lighthouse room that "smelled of salt water and snow and of the past," and that is very much the aroma of his richly atmospheric novel. Though movie ready in its pacing and narrative vividness, it is also unusually lived in, focused and compassionate. As its title suggests, Snow Falling on Cedars is poised at precisely that point where an elliptical Japanese delicacy meets the woody, unmoving fiber of the Pacific Northwest. Out of that encounter, Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true.