“The whole film,” says the latter, “is about the process of revealing. Nothing is quite what it appears to be, therefore you never give it all away at once, but gradually. That was our guiding principle in the overall design.”

The starting point of this process of revelation in Snow Falling on Cedars is the discovery by Sheriff Art Moran (Richard Jenkins) of the body of Carl Heine, a young fisherman, drowned in his own nets alongside his fishing boat. Carl’s boat, the Susan Marie, is discovered off the south side of White Sand Point just after dawn following a still September night when the fog had been as thick as cotton. The fog that blankets the San Juan Islands, blurring both vision and perception, is a recurrent element in the story.

Scott Hicks on location in Canada.

At first, Carl’s death looks like an accident. But gradually, the clues begin to point towards a young Japanese American fisherman, Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune). It is 1951, remember, and memories of Pearl Harbor are still fresh among San Piedro’s predominantly Northern European community. For the island’s Japanese Americans, the war brought internment in the infamous Manzanar camp in the Californian desert.

Kazuo was not interned: he volunteered for the US Army and served his country. But his family, his future wife and her family all spent the war in Manzanar.

Resentment and suspicion are buried just below the surface on both sides. But they are felt most bitterly by Etta Heine (Celia Weston), Carl’s mother, who had appropriated the Miyamoto’s strawberry farm during the War, and whose hatred of the family comprises that classic mixture of fear, proprietorial greed and the sense of economic threat which Japan would soon come to pose to North America as a whole.

Snow Falling on Cedars is structured like a whodunnit, with San Piedro newspaperman Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) determinedly following up clues that the sheriff’s investigation doesn’t (or won’t) bother to uncover. But the essence of the novel (and the film) is a kind of elegy for lost love - as a teenager, Ishmael was involved in a long and, because of their different racial backgrounds, illicit love affair with Hatsue, who is now Kazuo’s wife - and lost innocence: the delicate balance of life on San Piedro, dependent as it is on fishing, strawberry-growing and timber, has been shaken if not destroyed by the bitter realities of World War II and the changing economy of the Pacific Northwest.

As his name might suggest, Guterson himself is a third generation Pacific Northwester-ner, and has lived for the past 16 years on the San Juans, a half-hour’s ferry-ride from Seattle, sandwiched between the southern tip of Canada’s Victoria Island and the Washington State coast. It was also the location for the Free Willy movies.