Snow Falling on Cedars shows how powerful prejudices and biases can be. The jury comes this close to convicting Kabuo Miyamoto for the murder of Carl Heine, despite the fact there was enough room for reasonable doubt to house an elephant. Guterson sets us up from the beginning to view San Piedro as a kind of insular place that's closed off from the wider world (and likes it that way), and you soon realize that the legacy of World War II + those isolationist tendencies create conditions ripe for bias and prejudice.
Questions About Prejudice
- When Hatsue is young, Mrs. Shigemura warns her to avoid white men because they will exoticize her and turn her into a fantasy for their own purposes. Do you think Ishmael avoids that trap? Why or why not?
- Does the novel itself go beyond stereotyping its Japanese characters and portraying them as hollow or inscrutable?
- Does the novel suggest that most of the anti-Japanese sentiment on San Piedro stems from the war, or does it run deeper than that? How do we know?
Chew on This
By relegating its Japanese characters to the background and leaving massive holes in its portrayal of Hatsue's emotions and motivations, Snow Falling on Cedars uncritically replicates some of the stereotypes and "exoticizing" that it critiques.
In its plot structure, Snow Falling on Cedars purposely replicates some of the stereotypes and "exoticizing" tendencies that it criticizes among the characters, in order to draw attention to these stereotypes.