Snow Falling on Cedars

I finished Snow Falling on Cedars last night, staying up until midnight to read the last few pages. It's a remarkable book that will stay with me for a long time. I found it very hard to get into it at first and had to make a real effort to stick with it, but was rewarded as it found its way under my skin as all the best books do.
Its subject is something I knew nothing about, the Japanese communities who arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century, and their fate when war broke out. I had no idea that many Japanese fought in the US army during World War Two. So there was much to learn about in the book, something I always enjoy.
I made a list as I went along of the issues on which the narrative touched: love, loss, the passage of time, parenthood, belief, unbelief, grief, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, different cultures colliding, immigration, war and peace. The weather and its impact on our thoughts and actions is a constant thread running through the book, used throughout a a metaphor. As a snowstorm engulfs the community, it freezes, not only the pipes and road, but the souls of the three central characters, Ishmael, Kabuo and Hatsoe. Ishmael and Hatsuo had an secret relationship as children and teenagers, and it is the memory of this that haunts Ishmael after he returns from the war, in which he lost an arm. Memory, and the tricks it plays on us, is a major theme.
Their lives have been blighted by war, and it's as if their souls have been frozen over. At the end the reader becomes immersed in Ishmael's thought processes, almost becoming him as he ponders the choices he has to make. We will him to make the right one, but the possibility of him making the wrong one is left open right up to the end.
I did think the end was a little rushed and the book hurtled towards its conclusion in the last few pages. But, a fine book nevertheless, one that will live in the memory.