On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with cold-blooded murder. It is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Chambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific War and now runs the island newspaper inherited from his father, is among the journalists covering the trial - a trial that brings him close, once again, to Hatsue Miyamoto, the wife of the accused man and Ishmael's never-forgotten boyhood love.
Hatsue and Ishmael, in the years before the war came between them, had dug clams together, picked strawberries in San Piedro's verdant fields, and passed long hours in the secrecy of a giant hollow cedar tree.
Now, as a heavy snowfall surrounds and impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial, they and the other participants must come to a reckoning with the past, with culture, nature, and love, and with the possibilities of the human will.
