Snow Falling on Cedars

This post-World War II hybrid—courtroom drama, love story, murder mystery, ethnic melodrama—has an apt sense of the tangled heritages of an area in which Japanese-Americans have become an integral part of the community. But the story unfolds via a network of detours and flashbacks, some of which are rather elaborate and convoluted, and the various parts don’t add up to a fully coherent whole.