Snow Falling on Cedars: Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

Ishmael heads over to the coast guard lighthouse on Point White. The lighthouse’s purpose is to direct disoriented ships in the face of unsavory weather. Before the tower was built, 11 ships had run aground. Decades have passed since then, and there is no longer any sign of the ships—they’ve all washed away. Despite the presence of the lighthouse, accidents still happen when the fog is too thick to see through. The wrecks almost cannot be helped. Islanders consider them to be “ordained by God, or at any rate unavoidable.” They accept the inevitability of shipwrecks, but ponder them privately.

Ishmael sits before “the lighthouse chief petty officer, […] Evan Powell.” Ishmael tells Powell he’s writing a story about the storm and would like to go through old logs to compare this storm’s intensity to past storms. Powell tells Ishmael that the lighthouse keeps a lot of logs, but telephones Levant, the radioman, to assist Ishmael. Levant directs Ishmael to the records room. He shows Ishmael how all records—radio transmissions, shipping logs, weather reports, maintenance—are sorted by date. Levant reveals that he’s been the radioman only for a few months—he was promoted after some others were transferred to another location.

Ishmael tries to concentrate on the abundance of records, but his thoughts are pulled back to Hatsue in the backseat of his car earlier that day. He is overcome by memories of his and Hatsue’s first interactions after the war. In particular, he recalls a moment when he was behind her in line at the general store. Ishmael stood there, hating her silently, as she told him she was sorry that he’d lost his arm in the war. Ishmael replied, “The Japs did it.” Ishmael immediately apologized to Hatsue for the derogatory comment, and for “everything.” He told her how miserable he was. They parted ways.

During this period, Ishmael would seek refuge in nature, taking long hikes along the beach. On one of these walks, he encountered Hatsue and her baby. Hatsue refused to speak with him then. Ishmael whined about how lonely he was, and begged for Hatsue to hold him one last time. If Hatsue could do this, Ishmael reasoned, he could finally move on from her. But Hatsue declined: she was married, after all. “I feel terrible for your misery, but I’m not going to hold you, Ishmael,” she said. “You’re going to have to live without holding me.”

Ishmael stops daydreaming and focuses on his task of combing through the maritime records. His thoughts of Hatsue have made him wonder if, perhaps, there’s evidence pertaining to Kabuo’s trial present among all the records and logs. He abandons his research for the storm story and turns instead to the records for September 15 and 16. In a series of transmission logs, Ishmael discovers that, the night/morning of Carl’s death, a large ship called the S.S. West Corona had passed, off course, through the Ship Channel Bank, where Carl’s boat had been. The logs were signed by “a Seaman Philip Milholland.” Ishmael pockets the logs and returns to Levant.

Ishmael asks Levant who Milholland might be. Levant explains that Milholland was the radioman whom he replaced—on September 16. Ishmael realizes that Milholland had logged the Corona’s transmissions and then immediately been transferred elsewhere. “Nobody knows,” Ishmael realizes. The men had filed away these logs among hundreds of others just like them. There would be no reason for anybody involved in the trial to even start to look for evidence here.

Ishmael pieces together the meaning of these logs: “that on the night Carl Heine had drowned, stopping his watch at 1:47, a freighter plowed through Ship Channel Bank at 1:42—just five minutes earlier—no doubt throwing before it a wall of water big enough to founder a small gill-netting boat and toss even a big man overboard.” These logs prove that Kabuo couldn’t have murdered Carl.