Snow Falling on Cedars: Motifs 3 key examples

These weather patterns recur across the island’s different spaces and different timelines. The reader hears about them in courtroom scenes as well as during flashbacks, so the past and the present feel blurred and caught inside the same everlasting winter. The cold and the constant fog dull the landscape and obscure the edges of things, which has the effect of blurring the lawyers’ present-day questions with the townsfolks’ unresolved past events.

The effect of this motif also goes beyond the book’s physical setting. The enveloping whiteness of the wintry weather reflects characters' tendencies to speak indirectly and keep secrets. No one says exactly what they feel, and it seems like people will do almost anything to avoid confrontation. Even when under oath, people struggle to name things clearly or assign blame in public settings. In trial scenes where someone withholds information or keeps emotion in check, the presence of the blurring whiteness of the snowstorm outside seems to reinforce that choice. Indeed, Kabuo’s whole trial is blanketed in obscurity by the raging winter storm outside. The snowstorm removes color and sound from the world outside the courtroom. By doing this, it also echoes how testimony in the trial often hides as much as it reveals. This visual blurring mirrors the moral blurring at the heart of the novel. 

Wintry weather does not only suggest confusion. It also creates a sense of oppressive pressure and a feeling of being enclosed. Everyone who lives there seems to be trapped by the natural forces of San Piedro island. The weather literally shuts Guterson’s characters off from the outside world once they arrive there. Their physical entrapment matches how their shared guilt and shared history confine them. Not one of them is able to escape the influence of what happened during the war. People do not speak openly about the past or about their prejudices. Just like the winter weather obscures the physical structures on the island, the underlying tensions between the inhabitants of San Piedro are present, whether they’re seen or unseen.

Kabuo, in particular, says very little across the span of his trial, even when speaking could help him. Hatsue also rarely speaks her mind, especially when it comes to her past with Ishmael. Ishmael himself keeps his findings about the lighthouse logs hidden for most of the trial, which seriously delays their potential to change the trial's outcome. The collective effects of their separate silences shape the trial. However, it’s not just the novel’s three main characters who rarely speak their minds. Their silence also reflects personal and cultural habits that they have learned from their upbringings. The courtroom of San Piedro brims with withheld information. People sit on facts and feelings and refuse to share their perspectives out of fear of both legal judgment and social shame. 

Guterson’s use of flashbacks often reveals that characters could have said more but didn’t. These missed chances build a pattern of missed opportunities, which can sometimes feel frustrating for the reader. Again and again, characters keep quiet in moments that call for honesty. These repeated failures grow more important as the story moves toward its resolution. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Guterson is also connecting this silence to the tension between White American and Japanese American cultures. Japanese American characters like Kabuo and Hatsue live with a doubled sense of pressure to remain composed, especially in public settings. They have learned restraint, partly from the Japanese traditions of their familial upbringing and partly from American suspicion of anyone of Japanese descent during and after the war. 

White characters like Ishmael tend to both be more expressive and to expect more open emotional expression from others. Because of this, to Ishmael and his White companions, any silence from Japanese characters can be read as a sign of guilt. This repeated cultural misunderstanding feeds the pre-existing mistrust in the courtroom. The story never treats silence as neutral. Instead, it shows how silence protects some people while harming others, how this difference falls along racial and cultural lines, and how unspoken conflicts can sometimes be worse than all-out confrontations.

Ishmael, while reporting the trial, often loses focus on the present when past moments with Hatsue overtake his thoughts. There’s no resolution to be gained from most of these meandering trips to the past, but he can’t seem to help being sucked into them. Hatsue, too, sits in the gallery but mentally revisits everything that happened to her before and during the war. Instead of focusing on the present where her husband is being tried for murder, she broods on what happened while she was in the internment camp and on her decision to leave Ishmael behind. These memories literally interrupt the proceedings of the trial for the reader, who is then snapped back into the present when the memory concludes. 

Characters in this novel do not just “remember” things in passing. They actually re-enter the past in their personal narratives, which allows the reader to move through the story as though they were present. As they do so, the reader gains the ability to interpret characters' present actions through the context of the past. These cycles build a looped structure where past and present keep melting into each other. Indeed, for the reader, people’s testimonies become less important than the flashbacks that surround them.

The novel treats memory as subjective and people’s recounting of it as even more so. Characters do not recall events accurately because they don’t have the omniscient perspective of the narrator. Instead, their memories are colored by their own experiences and prejudices. For instance, Kabuo does not speak much during the trial even though his life is at stake. However, his flashbacks give shape to the things about the war that changed him and help to show the frustration he carries and the damage that he was dealt. Hatsue maintains a composed public face as she was trained to in girlhood, but her private memories reveal the intense pressure she felt growing up to conform to cultural expectations of femininity. Because of these private reruns of the past, the reader holds more information than any one character. However, even though the reader is privy to these memory loops, there’s still a lot of ambiguity around what the truth truly was. The past, instead of staying behind Guterson’s characters, keeps cycling forward and repeating itself.