Motherhood
Akiko is a portrait of motherhood, and for symbolic purposes, she is also the only experience of motherhood that Beccah ever knows. To Beccah, her mother's aspects are helpful pictures of life in the feminine mode. Beccah notices that Akiko is incredibly instinctual and urgent, and also a little bit on the wacky side, socially speaking. Beccah is forced to endure serious embarrassment, confusion, and terror whenever her mother slips into insane fugue states; she seems possessed by spirits from hell, but her story is an insightful demonstration of how she was made that way by injustice.
Magic and spiritual insight
As noticed above, Beccah's life is suspiciously near to witchcraft and clairvoyant behavior. One crucial detail to remember in regards to this imagery is that Akiko says that she has magically seduced fate into killing her abusive husband as a favor to her and Beccah. Beccah instantly fears that maybe she has also doomed her mother, because Beccah also seriously hates her mother. When she learns about Akiko's life, she realizes that the spiritualism and divining have helped her mother deal with unimaginable trauma, pain, hopelessness, and injustice.
War and sexual slavery
The story Akiko tells of her life is as a martyr of earth's most nightmarish era in the past hundred years. She was sold to Japan by her own family and forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army who hated her with prejudice. She was hated for her gender and for her ethnicity, as well as for her role in society as an involuntary prostitutes. To appreciate what that was like for Beccah's sense of her mother's imagery, imagine learning such news about one's own family. The sorrow is inherited by Beccah, because in order to properly judge her mother, she must remember the years of intense sexual and physical abuse.
Trauma and suffering
Now that Beccah has learned her mother's truth, it is time for her and the reader to reassess the fragile minded mother. Is she weak or strong? Beccah thought she was weak, but she is strong. Beccah's own life and existence is literally proof of this, because Akiko, whose name and identity are both changed by intense seasons of acute trauma and physical and emotional suffering, goes on from even a botched abortion to continue living. Her life is a martyrdom of warfare and human evil, and she is properly judged only as a survivor of one of the earth's most intimate and extreme suffering.
