Snow Falling on Cedars

San Piedro island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who livers there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American names 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 one man's guilt. For on San Piedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries-memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of a land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Peidro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during WWII, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.