Snow Falling on Cedars: Chapters 1–10

by David Guterson
In the shadow of World War II, a Japanese-American man is accused of murdering a fisherman, exposing long-buried secrets, animosity, and prejudice in the island community of San Piedro.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–10, Chapters 11–18, Chapters 19–24, Chapters 25–32
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. disdain
    lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
    Some in the gallery would later say that his stillness suggested a disdain for the proceedings; others felt certain it veiled a fear of the verdict that was to come.
  2. irrefutable
    impossible to deny or disprove
    His figure, especially the neck and shoulders, communicated the impression of irrefutable physical strength and of precise, even imperial bearing.
  3. propriety
    correct behavior
    Most had dressed with the same communal propriety they felt on Sundays before attending church services, and since the courtroom, however stark, mirrored in their hearts the dignity of their prayer houses, they conducted themselves with churchgoing solemnity.
  4. exile
    expel from a country
    He had been exiled in the county jail for seventy-seven days—the last part of September, all of October and all of November, the first week of December in jail.
  5. pristine
    completely free from dirt or contamination
    Two dozen coves and inlets, each with its pleasant muddle of sailboats and summer homes, ran the circumference of San Piedro, an endless series of pristine anchorages.
  6. contempt
    lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
    Ishmael understood that an air of disdain, of contempt for the island and its inhabitants, blew from the knot of out-of-town reporters toward the citizens in the gallery.
  7. deference
    a courteous expression of esteem or regard
    The sheriff was a lean figure, unimposing, who habitually chewed a stick of Juicy Fruit gum (though he wasn’t chewing any at the moment, mostly out of deference to the American legal system, which he believed in wholeheartedly despite its flaws).
  8. perpetual
    uninterrupted in time and indefinitely long continuing
    San Piedro lived and breathed by the salmon, and the cryptic places where they ran at night were the subject of perpetual conversation.
  9. fleeting
    lasting for a markedly brief time
    For a brief moment Art understood Carl’s face as the sort of illusion men are prone to at sea—or hoped it was this, rather, with a fleeting desperation—but then as the net reeled in Carl’s bearded throat appeared too and the face completed itself.
  10. prescient
    perceiving the significance of events before they occur
    The right, however, as if to make up for this deficiency, seemed preternaturally observant, even prescient, and as he plodded over the courtroom floorboards, advancing with a limp toward Art Moran, motes of light winked through it.
  11. lithe
    moving and bending with ease
    And with a slowness that embarrassed him—because as a young man he had been lithe and an athlete, had always moved fluidly across the floorboards of courtrooms, had always felt admired for his physical appearance—he made his way back to his seat at the defendant’s table, where Kabuo Miyamoto sat watching him.
  12. attenuated
    reduced in strength
    Their faces, bathed in the attenuated December light from the tall windows, appeared quiet and even faintly reverent.
  13. zealot
    a fervent and even militant proponent of something
    Ishmael’s grandfather had been a Highland Presbyterian, his grandmother an Irish zealot from the bogs above Lough Ree; they met in Seattle five years before the Great Fire, wed, and raised six sons.
  14. inveterate
    habitual
    Arthur became an astute and deliberate vegetable gardener, an inveterate observer of island life, and gradually a small-town newspaperman in the truest sense: he came to recognize the opportunity his words provided for leverage, celebrity, and service.
  15. symbiotic
    of organisms living together, especially to mutual advantage
    It was Ishmael's job to set the impression meters and water fountains and to act in the role of fly boy; Arthur, who had formed over the years a symbiotic relationship with the machine, ducked in and out inspecting the plates and printing cylinders.
  16. oblivious
    failing to keep in mind
    He stood mere inches from the clattering rollers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that—as he’d explained to his son—were he caught by a sleeve he’d be instantly popped open like a child’s balloon and splattered across the walls.
  17. emulate
    strive to equal or match, especially by imitating
    He was, his son remembered, morally meticulous, and though Ishmael might strive to emulate this, there was nevertheless this matter of the war—this matter of the arm he’d lost—that made such scrupulosity difficult.
  18. autonomous
    existing as an independent entity
    Thus on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man.
  19. credence
    the mental attitude that something is believable
    The intimacy of it, the comfort of other voices giving credence to their private myths, prepared them to meet their wives with less distance than they might otherwise bring home after fishing.
  20. ethos
    the distinctive spirit of a culture or an era
    The most respected men, in accordance with the ethos that had evolved on San Piedro, pursued no one and cultivated radio silence.
  21. protocol
    code of correct conduct
    He was not profusely thankful and there was that silence about him, that bearded, gruff, and giant silence, that unwillingness to engage the protocols of island life.
  22. submersion
    sinking until covered completely with water
    It was a result, Horace knew, of air, mucus, and seawater all mingled by respiration, which meant the deceased had been alive at submersion.
  23. asphyxiation
    the condition of being deprived of oxygen
    But anoxia, like Alec Vilderling, or a waterlogged, choking asphyxiation?
  24. wield
    handle effectively
    It was precisely the sort of lethal impression Horace had seen at least two dozen times in the Pacific war, the result of close-in combat, hand to hand, and made by a powerfully wielded gun butt.
  25. precede
    come before
    You don’t know whether the wound to the head preceded death or not?
  26. unequivocally
    in an unambiguous manner
    But the cause of death—unequivocally—was drowning.
  27. stoicism
    an indifference to pleasure or pain
    Driving up to see Susan Marie Heine, Art muddled out his words in silence, revising as he went and planning his demeanor, which ought, he decided, to have a vaguely military architecture with certain nautical decorative touches—to report a man’s death at sea to his widow was a task done gravely but with tragic stoicism for centuries on end, he figured.
  28. bacchanal
    a wild gathering
    One part bacchanal, one part tribal potlatch, one part vestigial New England supper, the entire affair hinged on the coronation of the Strawberry Princess—always a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder—in an oddly solemn ceremony before the Island County Courthouse at sundown of the inaugural evening.
  29. unwitting
    not aware or knowing
    The girl, it turned out, was an unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice who allowed the festivities to go forward with no uttered ill will.
  30. strenuous
    taxing to the utmost; testing powers of endurance
    Her life had always been strenuous—field work, internment, more field work on top of housework—but during this period under Mrs. Shigemura’s tutelage she had learned to compose herself in the face of it.
  31. worldly
    characteristic of secularity rather than spirituality
    It seemed to her that in her external bearing she had succeeded only in deceiving Mrs. Shigemura; inwardly she knew her aspiration for worldly happiness was frighteningly irresistible.
  32. humiliate
    cause to feel shame
    At first they lived in a Beacon Hill boardinghouse where the walls were plastered with pictures from magazines and where the white people on the streets outside treated them with humiliating disdain.
  33. internment
    confinement during wartime
    They’d been married at the Manzanar internment camp in a tar paper Buddhist chapel.
  34. solitude
    the state or situation of being alone
    There was a place in him she could not reach where he made his choices in solitude, and this made her not only uneasy about him but afraid for their future, too.
  35. magnate
    a very wealthy or powerful businessperson
    Troubled by the general moral demise of the East—manifest, particularly, in the Lindbergh kidnapping—the well-known home appliance magnate and his high-born Bostonian wife had brought their three sons, a maid, a cook, a butler, and a pair of private tutors to San Piedro’s secluded shores.
  36. behest
    an authoritative command or request
    The arrangement, she explained at the behest of Alvin Hooks when the court had been called into session again, included a five-hundred-dollar down payment and an eight-year “lease-to-own” contract.
  37. defunct
    no longer in force or use; inactive
    “The witness makes reference to a currently defunct statute of the State of Washington which made it illegal at the time of which she speaks for an alien, a noncitizen, to hold title to real estate."
  38. predicate
    involve as a necessary condition or consequence
    Mrs. Heine has told us that her deceased husband, in joint conspiracy with the defendant’s deceased father, entered into an agreement which, shall we say, was predicated on a rather liberal, albeit mutually satisfying, interpretation of these laws.
  39. illuminate
    make free from confusion or ambiguity
    That furthermore such information is vital to the state’s case and that a clear portrait of the agreement between the defendant and the witness will illuminate the defendant’s motive for committing murder.
  40. coveted
    greatly desired
    Ole Jurgensen told everything—the way the politeness had gone out of the Japanese man, the unreadable Japanese expression on his face when he heard that the land he coveted had been sold.
Created on Wed Sep 18 22:04:10 EDT 2013 (updated Mon Aug 06 15:35:54 EDT 2018)

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