Stranger imagery
The Japanese protagonists of this novel stay nameless throughout these interconnected vignettes. That abstraction highlights an important aspect of their point of view. They often feel like identity-deprived strangers without community and without any reasonable method for learning about American culture. Many of the girls are so plagued by the absurdity of their daily lives that they walk over to a farm and start working on the farm to find a lifestyle that more closely fits their conception of life. They are not individualists in the Western way, and their emotional isolation can become severe.
Prejudice
The women understand enough about America to know that they are not always welcomed. They are often treated with hostility as if they had immigrated specifically to harm the natives. To them, it is just blind hatred, because they do not understand the complexities of racism in America. They just know that a lot of people hate people from Japan for no apparent reason. The story touches on the way Pearl Harbor amplified that xenophobia to epic proportions, and many of the Japanese families experience a seriously horrifying interruption to their daily life when the government rounds them up and moves them into mandatory government-controlled camps.
Sexual imagery
Because these characters are women who are literally "mail-order" brides, the novel includes uncomfortable sexual imagery. The women try to be excited by their new husbands, but many times the man starts on the wrong foot by lying about their appearance. By honesty, the women could have had time to make peace about their spouses that privately, but because of deceit, their marriage nights are often defined by distrust and disappointment. Distrust and disappointment are famously "unsexy" emotions to feel about anyone, let alone someone to whom you've just committed your entire life.
Absurdity
The novel ends by suggesting that the deep emotional suffering of the Japanese community in California was largely for nothing, which is to say, technically absurd. The other use of absurdist imagery is that meaninglessness defines the Japanese experience of American racism—which is for no real cause except xenophobia. It also affects their ability to speak and understand English, because language which is not understood is absurd—the meaning is not translated. When the novel shows the absolute lack of consequences for American internment of Japanese citizens and visitors, the reader senses again that their suffering was absurdly meaningless—there were no legal ramifications, nor did any of the Americans really care that much to do anything for their Japanese neighbors.
