Maya's father, Masataka Amano, was a war correspondent, and was always away from home on various assignments. One of Maya's memories is that he took Maya to Alaya Shrine to pray that her dreams would come true. She said that she was wishing that Daddy would stay home, and he told her that journalism was an important job. She'd made him a little rabbit as a good-luck charm, and he told her to keep it instead until he came home, saying that if she cried, Mr. Rabbit would laugh at her. Sadly, Mr. Amano was killed, and she never saw him again. So the bunny reminds her of her father. Deep in her heart, she's angry at her father for being so selfish and putting his job over his family, so she wants to be a journalist who can balance her family and her career.

Maya continued to come to Alaya Shrine as a teenager and pray for her future, and during a festival, she saw four little masked kids playing together. She stopped to talk to them, and they invited her to join their group - the Masquerade, which could make her dreams come true. She was probably lonely and sad, so she joined the kids, becoming their older sister. She came every day to play with them, amusing herself with how they played and fought together. She taught them a game called "Persona," which was supposed to show you what you'd be like when you grew up.

Two of the boys, Red Eagle and Black Falcon, were especially attached to her, and one evening they came to her apartment complex and knocked on her window. At first she didn't recognize them; in the dusk, the two boys looked like twins. But then she realized that it was Red Eagle and Black Falcon without their masks, and she took them to the park near her house to hang out with them. She told them about a German poem she'd read; the two kids were the "doppelgangers" of the poem, and she encouraged them to always be good friends. They in turn promised to always protect her.

At some point, her mother decided to move away, and she had to tell the children that she wouldn't be able to play with them anymore. She went to tell them, and they were heartbroken and begged her not to leave. Three of the children decided to lock her in the shrine overnight so she couldn't leave, and when Tatsuya protested, they locked him in there with her too.

Maya didn't panic, but played with Tatsuya all evening in the shrine so that he wouldn't get scared. When it became dark, the arsonist Tatsuya Sudou came to Alaya and set it afire. When she realized that the shrine was burning, Maya presumably helped Tatsuya escape out of a window, and banged on the door, telling him to run away, since the arsonist was still out there. For the first time, she summoned her persona and was able to escape the burning shrine, but she was badly burnt in the attempt. Because the other three kids thought she'd died in the fire, a rumor spread that a little girl's ghost haunted Mt. Iwato.

Soon after that, she moved away with her mom and didn't return to the area until she took a job in Kismet Publishing in Aoba. She was made editor of the teen magazine Coolest, and with her friend and parner Yukino, they went around the city collecting info on the newest teen fads, such as the new "Joker Charm" or the "Joker Curse." (You may remember Mizuno complaining about Maya's article "The Dream of the Rumored Student" in Batsu. In Tsumi, the rumored student was Jun, but in Batsu, it's probably Tatsuya. That whole doppelganger thing again.)

Maya had a stalker who she was worried about; this was Tatsuya Sudou again, who thought she was a Witch for having escaped him with her Persona power. So when he took off his mask at the Air Museum, she knew exactly who was chasing them...

In Xibalba, Maya quotes the second half of the poem "Le calmant" ("Sedative") by Marie Laurencin (translated into Japanese from the French; here's the original poem in French and English.)
Maya adds on two lines of her own:

Worse than forgotten
Is being a woman who ties people down.

Maya would never want to become the kind of person who causes pain and sadness to those she loves, the way that the rest of the group was traumatized by their childhood losses. If she were to die, she would want them to forget her completely so they could be happy. At the end of Tsumi, that's why she tells them to "hurry up and forget about me," unlike most characters who tell people not to forget about them when they die.

That's why at the end of Eternal Punishment, it was really strange (in my opinion) for Maya to even CONSIDER clinging to Tatsuya, weeping and begging him to take her with him. That would be creating ties for him and making it harder for Tatsuya to leave peacefully. By refusing to forget and move on, Tatsuya would be betraying her dream too....