Summary: Chapter 29
There are things in this universe that
we cannot control, and then there are the things we can.
See Important Quotations Explained
Alvin Hooks makes his closing arguments to the jury. He
urges the jurors to imagine Carl in need of help and at the mercy
of Kabuo, who leaps aboard Carl’s boat and kills him with the gaff.
He implores the jury to look into the face of the accused man to
determine his innocence or guilt.
Nels Gudmundsson then offers his closing argument, noting
that there is no evidence to suggest Kabuo plotted a murder or had
a motive to murder. Nor is there any hard evidence that foul play
even occurred. Nels asserts that the trial is not about murder but
about prejudice, reminding the jury that Kabuo’s face—the face of
Japanese America—must not sway their feelings. They must judge him as
an individual, an American, and a fellow member of their community.
Closing the trial, Judge Fielding reminds the jury that
the charge against Kabuo is first-degree murder. Conviction on this
serious charge requires a unanimous ruling by the jury. The judge
reminds the jury that it must deliver a guilty verdict only if it
is convinced of every element of the charge beyond a reasonable
doubt. He reminds the jurors that if they have any reasonable uncertainty
regarding the truth of the charges, they are bound by law to find
Kabuo not guilty.
Analysis: Chapters 25–29
The testimonies in these chapters alternately address
Kabuo’s identity within groups and his identity as an individual.
This tension between the individual and the community is one of
Guterson’s constant concerns in the novel, and here we see the different
witnesses struggle to define Kabuo in terms of different communities.
To Josiah Gillanders, Kabuo’s status as a gill-netter overshadows
his identity as a Japanese American. When Kabuo assists Carl, it
is their shared identity as fishermen that ultimately allows them
to put their other differences aside. Carl decides to sell the seven
acres to Kabuo because Kabuo has heeded the gill-netters’ implicit
code of ethics. In their confrontation on the water, Kabuo directly
challenges Carl’s prejudice and appeals to his reason as an individual.
Kabuo also argues that though they are of different races, they
are both Americans. They cannot build a relationship if they continue
to consider each other “Japs” and hakujin. It is
only when they encounter each other as fellow fishermen and fellow
Americans that they put their prejudices aside.
Prosecutor Alvin Hooks, on the other hand, subtly tries
to identify Kabuo as a member of the Japanese community rather than
a fisherman. Knowing that the white jurors likely do not regard
Japanese-Americans as full members of the San Piedro community, Hooks
anticipates and plays on this prejudice in order to build his case
against Kabuo. Hooks’s hypothetical scenario, in which Kabuo pretends
to be in trouble in order to lure Carl Heine to his death, plays
on these prejudices, relying on the stereotype of Japanese-Americans
as treacherous, poker-faced, cold-blooded killers. Hooks subtly
compares Kabuo to the wartime stereotype of the Japanese-American
who professes loyalty to the United States while stabbing it in
the back. When Hooks tells the jurors to look at Kabuo’s face and
do their duty as citizens of their community, he implicitly wants
them to look at Kabuo’s Japanese face—an outsider’s face. Hooks
wants the jury to find Kabuo guilty because he looks physically
different and is therefore not part of their community.
Guterson emphasizes the physical differences between
Kabuo and Carl, suggesting that these disparities are what cause
the community’s opposite perceptions of the two men. Carl embodied
San Piedro’s ideal citizen: the silent, self-sufficient white fisherman.
He was also a war veteran who, unlike the damaged Horace or Ishmael, was
able to keep his past safely buried out of sight. The fact that
his fellow fishermen hardly knew Carl—and even feared him to some extent—is
no longer relevant. In death he is a hero of sorts. Kabuo, by contrast,
is the villain but also the victim. A young man born and raised
in America who served his country in war even as that same country
left his family languishing in an internment camp, Kabuo should
be considered a true hero. Yet upon his return to San Piedro he
found a community that had no interest in helping him or his fellow
Japanese Americans. Kabuo serves as a painful reminder and symbol
of the white community’s guilt in allowing such discrimination to
befall the Japanese-American community. Hooks’s plea that the jury
do its citizenly duty by once again purging the “Japanese menace”
offers the white community retroactive justification for the discrimination
it practiced during the war.
