If not the previous Are Maiden, then perhaps Akyuu's mother is who we see. They photographed the happenings of the celebration and not the baby directly. In the article, Akyuu literally states "The newspaper article released at my birth. " So by "birth" she either means the rite of passage of becoming a full-fledged Child of Miare, or she really was born in 109.
The original work (the newspaper frontpage) is actually fairly unambiguous in its intention, both in and out of universe: it's a portrait of the smart and confident newly born Child of Miare. For alternate interpretations to be true, one would have to assume the original work to be actively misleading (rather than merely "ambiguous") in conveying its message. By common sense, both in and out of universe, if the woman in the photo is the mother, she should be depicted in a way that implies her identity, such as carrying her baby.
BTW, in Shinto and Japanese culture, pregnant women or women who have recently given birth are considered unclean (
kegare, same concept translated as "impurity" in the SSiB translation), and are not allowed in Shinto shrines. Gensokyo doesn't have to work this way, but that would make Gensokyo such an exception that the author would have to specifically direct the reader's attention to it.
Someone has asked me this question about Kokoro's
last line in some campaigns:
I don't quite get why in Japanese says the Noh of Darkness, but just above that it reads something entirely different. Is it an alternate reading? The actual pronunciation or something like that?
I think this question is of general interest, so I'll answer it here.
An important feature of the Japanese language is that its writing system combines the phonetic kana (hiragana and katakana), and the borrowed Chinese characters (kanji). The same kanji (or combination of kanjis) can have several different phonetic pronunciations, and for various reasons, such as education, or particularly obscure words, it may be necessary to adage kanji with smaller print of kana as reading aid (
furigana).
Some writers have turned this into a rhetoric technique, by arbitrarily assigning the sound of one word to another word ("ateji"), creating a combination that's written as A, but read as B, to produce various effects, and lyrics often replace words with synonyms for the purpose of rhyme. ZUN actually uses it a fair amount in his writing; the difference is that previous translations tended to smooth those cases over, while the translatiors of HM has chosen to retain them this time.
ZUN generally uses ateji to turn a line into two versions: one spoken version that may flow more naturally, and one written version that is a more complete expression of meaning.
An earlier example: Orin's line as SA Stage 6 midboss:
地獄の底(ここら)で死ぬとみんな焼けて灰すら残らない
Literal translation: "Anyone who dies at the bottom of hell (here) will burn and leave no ashes."
Wiki translation: "If you die around here, you'll burn so hard there won't even be ashes left."
The idea is that Orin actually said "here". But a player will see "the bottom of hell" first, getting a good impression of the meaning of the line, then see "here", and understand that's what Orin said.
For the line about "Dark Noh": Kokoro actually said "My arcane art, Monkey Possession!" But the player will see "My arcane art, Noh of Darkness!" first, then notice the "Monkey Possession" part, and understand this is a Dark Noh technique called "Monkey Possession".
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atejihttp://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateCharacterReading