San Piedro Island, in Puget Sound off the coast of
Washington state, is an isolated and insular world in 1954. It has a large
Japanese-American population, which was loaded up and hauled away to a prison
camp named Manzanar, where they were incarcerated during World War II. Many of the residents of San Piedro still fear
and distrust those who returned.
When Carl Heine, a local fisherman, is found dead in his own
gill-net on his boat after a foggy night at sea, the sheriff quickly arrests
Kabuo Miyamoto, accusing him of murder despite scant evidence of a crime being
committed. Ishmael Chambers, who owns the
island newspaper, covers the trial. Much of the book is seen through his eyes
as he remembers growing up on the island.
The novel invokes the sight, the sound, the smell of an
island redolent with strawberry farms and cedar trees. The story itself is a languid, slow-moving
tale of people who live a simple life with complex emotions. There is a back
story involved for each major character, and those are developed in depth.
I found it to be a compelling book.
482 pages
