"An enemy on an island is an enemy forever," muses one character in David Guterson's luminous first novel. That is another way of saying there are no hiding places on a relatively small island: everyone is forced to be conscious of others and the need to be removed from others. In the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound in the early 1950s, both the residents of Japanese descent and the "American" communities are further divided and shadowed by their recent memories of war.
Snow Falling on Cedars (Harcourt Brace; 345 pages; $21.95), a beautifully assured and full-bodied story, centers on a...
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