She has a detached, tepid marriage, but a warm, sustaining friendship with a girl she met on her first day of school in America. Maya struggles for any semblance of a relationship with her intensely critical, self-absorbed Japanese mother, who has just married for the third time. Over the course of the novel Maya attempts to understand why her father sent her away. In the course of doing so, we readers hope her frozen soul will melt and she will achieve some kind of happiness. So we know the quest will be tough, but that Maya s aiming in the right direction.
Class distinguishes the lives of each heroine and the tone of each book.
Maya dwells smack in the middle of middle-class Middle America. Her mother may have locked her in the basement periodically, but Maya was not afraid of the dark and she learned to go into a meditative state until she was let out. She s been well fed, well clothed, and sent to college, where she studied painting. After graduation, however, she severely disappoints her mother s ambitions for her by giving up painting to become a weaver. Unlike Maya, Sonia comes from a desperately poor Japanese family in the ethically various underclass of Hawaii.