Snow Falling on Cedars: Chapters 11–18

When Kabuo approached from one side the boy had stared up at him and spoke through clenched teeth in tremulous German.

After a while, motionless in his cell, he began to feel objective about his face, and then he saw what Hatsue did.

Now, in his jail cell, he stared into the mirror at the mask he wore, which had been arranged by its wearer to suggest his war and the strength he’d mustered to face its consequences but which instead communicated haughtiness, a cryptic superiority not only to the court but to the prospect of death the court confronted him with.

The face in the hand mirror was none other than the face he had worn since the war had caused him to look inward, and though he exerted himself to rearrange it—because this face was a burden to wear—it remained his, unalterable finally.

He was a Buddhist and believed in the laws of karma, so it made sense to him that he might pay for his war murders: everything comes back to you, nothing is accidental.

At the cannery he held each fish in his hands before tossing it up and over the side—lambent chinooks, lithe and sleek, as long as his arm and weighing a fourth what he did, slick, glassy eyes held open.

Then he remembered strawberry fields from before Manzanar and he was in them as he’d always been, a sea of strawberries, rows and rows, a labyrinth of runners as intricate as a network of arteries feeding on the surface of a dozen farms he knew from childhood.

He saw his wife before she’d married him, he saw her picking at Ichikawas’ farm, how he’d come toward her carrying his caddy and as if by accident, by happenstance, how she hadn’t seen him coming, intent on her work, bent to it, but at the last minute lifted her gaze, lissome as ever, continuously picking—berries lay gently like red gems between her fingers—and while she met his eyes fed one of her woven pine baskets, three of which already lay full on the caddy, mounded over with ripened fruit.

She would squeeze his hand between her fingers, which had grown more callused and hard at Manzanar, and he would squeeze back, and they would return to their weeding.

They formed themselves into the League of the Divine Tempest and attacked an imperial garrison with swords aloft, having fasted for three days.

When they told him he could no longer wear his sword in public he conspired to kill men he hardly knew—government officials, men with families who lived near us, who were kind to us, whose children we played with.

He felt he did not deserve for a moment the happiness his family brought to him, so that late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he imagined that he would write them a note explicating his sin completely.

By noon three inches had settled on the town, a snow so ethereal it could hardly be said to have settled at all; instead it swirled like some icy fog, like the breath of ghosts, up and down Amity Harbor’s streets—powdery dust devils, frosted puffs of ivory cloud, spiraling tendrils of white smoke.

How was it possible for her to feign such coldness without feeling it at the same time?

He even said hello to her now and again as one element in his pretense.

Finally, the island sheriff, Gerald Lundquist, asked islanders to report suspicious activities or signs of sabotage to his office with all due speed.

There are on this island some 800 members of 150 families whose blood ties lie with a nation which yesterday committed an atrocity against all that is decent.

The pilot of a daily reconnaissance plane, said an Ensign Clawson, had noticed something he’d never noticed before: the Japanese strawberry farms on San Piedro Island were planted in rows pointing straight toward the radio transmitter at the end of Agate Point.

Dozens of Japanese farmers, he speculated, had stores of dynamite in their sheds and barns which could be used for sabotage.

“We’ve had some complaints from local citizens that certain enemy aliens on San Piedro Island have in their possession items declared illegal contraband,” said the smaller man.

She told her daughters, once again, the story of her odyssey from Japan on board the Korea Maru.

To persevere was always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy, and one’s perspective.

“I could say,” her mother went on, “that living among the hakujin has tainted you, made your soul impure, Hatsue.

They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love’s illusion.

The Kobayashis—they’d planted a thousand dollars’ worth of rhubarb on five acres in Center Valley—negotiated an agreement with Torval Rasmussen to tend and harvest their crop.

Arthur ran four articles on the imminent evacuation in his March 26 edition: “Island Japanese Accept Army Mandate to Move,” “Japanese Ladies Praised for Last-Minute PTA Work,” “Evacuation Order Hits Prep Baseball Nine,” and a “Plain Talk” column called “Not Enough Time,” which roundly condemned the relocation authority for its “pointless and merciless speed in exiling our island’s Japanese-Americans.”

They began to kiss and touch each other, but the emptiness she felt pervaded it and she found she couldn’t put her thoughts away.

She put her coat on and then, sitting up, began meticulously to brush the moss from her hair.

Twelve years later she would still see him this way, standing at the edge of the strawberry fields beneath the cover of the silent cedars, a handsome boy with one arm outstretched, beckoning her to come back.

Her kindness had always been condescending, and she had always paid a bit extra for her berries with the air of doling out charity.

The Los Angeles people were not very cordial and looked down on her for some inexplicable reason; she could not get a word in with them edgewise.

He’d spent those first hours apologizing to Fujiko and explaining in detail his financial desperation, pleading with her to work beside him and underscoring his talents and better traits—he was ambitious, hardworking, didn’t gamble or drink, he had no bad habits and saved his money, but times were so hard, he needed someone at his side.

He’d slept in a chair that first night, and Fujiko had stayed awake pondering ways to extricate herself from this situation.

I’m a pauper and I work my fingers to the bone.

“Your inference is that he left a line behind, then replaced it with that new one—exhibit B, right there in your hand—replaced it when he got back to the docks.”

And you’ve got at least fifty gill-netters out in the fog last night—any one of them as contentious as the next when he figures some other guy is cutting into his fish—and then you’ve got Ole Jurgensen.

San Piedro fishermen, in 1954, were apt to pay attention to signs and portents other men had no inkling of.

He circumnavigated the boat carefully, checking the mooring lines on each cleat as he went, kneeling to look at them closely.

Here was the Jap he’d been led to inexorably by every islander he’d spoken with.