The Japanese willingly take their place at the rear of the court, and the faces of the jury are all white. Using the courtroom and Kabuo's murder case, Guterson places the entire community of San Piedro on trial, highlighting the fragility of the island as a whole.
The court is used to accent the theme of human struggle against free will and chance. Chance and accident is the basis of the events of the trial. Carl Heine was killed by a freighter accidentally crossing his path while he was climbing his mast, Kabuo was suspected of murder by the chance that he had stumbled across Carl's ship, and that Carl had left his blood on Kabuo's fishing gaff. Thus Guterson compares impersonal chance to the motions of sea and storm. The maelstrom of the blizzard beats against the courthouse, where inside a group of people hold the power to decide a man's fate. Seasoned islanders realise the storm was beyond anyone's control. Yet the courthouse inhabitants must righteously decide the guilt and innocence of a man affected by random forces. The tensions between the aspects of life in San Piedro that its people can and cannot govern persists throughout the novel. As Nels Gudmundsson, Kabuo's attourney, interprets into his closing statement.
"There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can .
Let fate, conscience, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason."".
The challenge for the characters in the story is to accept forces beyond they control and make the right decisions to change whatever fate they can.
There is splendour in how Guterson uses the courtroom-drama as scaffolding for his grand story. Guterson rarely tells anything in a straightforward narrative, instead he weaves often-biased testimonies to illustrate the clash of opposing views. The most prominent of these is the island view on Japanese, and on Kabuo. Set only days after the thirteenth anniversary of Pearl Harbour, the trial still harbours resentment towards the Japs.