Miraijin Carrera

Miraijin Carrera is Adele Carrera’s daughter and Marco Carrera’s granddaughter, a child Marco ultimately understands as the “new man” who can begin humanity again. First imagined by her mother as the future’s answer to a life marked by suffering, Miraijin becomes, for Marco, the purpose that gathers his losses into a history and gives him a reason to go on. She is also more than the meaning he assigns her: the novel presents a distinctly recognizable child whose steadiness, physical inheritance, and care for others make her presence consequential in its own right.

Identity and the “New Man”

While Adele is alive, she repeatedly insists that humanity will begin again through her daughter. Marco initially indulges the idea rather than taking it literally, much as he once played along with Adele’s conviction that a thread connected her back to the wall. He thinks of the belief as a fantasy that helps his daughter endure what fate has dealt her: in exchange for suffering, she can imagine herself bringing forth a new humanity. Yet he does not simply dismiss the claim. He repeats that humanity starts over with Miraijin, even if, at first, he does so out of tenderness toward Adele rather than conviction.

Adele’s death changes the force of that belief. Marco is unprepared for the void she leaves, and his old way of surviving—remaining in place while life breaks around him—no longer suffices. After a period of living wildly, following Dr. Carradori’s advice and caring for Miraijin, he reaches a decisive understanding. The moment comes as he gives up the enormous poker winnings he has earned from his friend Dami Tamburini. He can then ask why the upheavals of his life happened to him: why he escaped a plane crash, lost his sister, endured a terrible divorce, helped bring his father’s life to an end, and buried a daughter of twenty-two. The answer he arrives at is Miraijin. She is the purpose toward which his past has led, and he has been given the privilege of raising her.

This recognition gives a new shape to Marco’s familiar pattern of arrested time and abrupt change. He can remain still for years while other lives move forward, then be thrown by an exceptional event into an unfamiliar life. Such transitions have brought pain and the angry question of why they happened to him. His eventual answer depends on timing: he does not ask the most devastating question until he can answer it. Miraijin turns the question from a demand for explanation into a purpose he can act upon.

Inheritance and Presence

Miraijin’s body connects her to several branches of the Carrera family without making her a simple replica of any one relative. Her unusual blue eyes recall Irene; her harmonious, athletic build recalls Adele as she grew; and her cheek dimple resembles Giacomo’s. Most intimate to Marco is a tiny mole in the saddle between the little and ring fingers of Miraijin’s right hand. Adele had the same mark, as does Marco. Mother and daughter used to press their hands together to match it, a private gesture they continued even in the hospital tub during Miraijin’s birth. Marco can carry the gesture forward with his granddaughter: amid the genetic changes that have produced this new child, the small mark has survived.

That bodily continuity matters alongside Miraijin’s difference. Marco sees her appearance as embodying an ideal of integration between peoples, but the family resemblance makes the idea personal as well as visionary. Her body carries traces of people who are gone and people still present; the shared mole, in particular, preserves an affectionate ritual from her relationship with her mother. In Marco’s eyes, inheritance is not only resemblance. It is a connection that can still be touched and repeated.

Miraijin’s everyday conduct also strengthens Marco’s belief in her unusual future. As a baby, she cries when she needs to, sleeps when she needs to, and learns readily, making her easy to care for. Growing up, she seems to do the right thing at the right time. At times she behaves outside the norm, but her parents, pediatrician, and teachers tend to regard these departures as improvements rather than problems. Marco comes to think that she is not merely exceptional by conventional standards: her different way of doing things can make others see it as better.

The quality he recognizes is persuasive rather than simply obedient. He imagines that Miraijin’s smooth face, striking eyes, voice, smile, and dimple belong to a person others naturally follow. Her body, still young and provisional, seems to possess the influence of a leader: people are inclined to imitate her. The judgment is Marco’s, formed as he studies the child he is raising; the narrative links it to his conviction about her future without presenting it as proof of a destiny already accomplished.

Granddaughter and Caregiver

After Adele’s death, caring for Miraijin becomes the practical center of Marco’s life as well as the meaning he draws from it. His early care is not idealized. He lives wildly, concentrating on the child and on biting into the life he has left, and even spends nights gambling while Miraijin sleeps in a hammock. That period helps him move through grief, but it is not the settled expression of his responsibility. His understanding deepens as he recognizes that raising her, rather than merely surviving beside her, is the purpose his life has come to hold.

Years later, when Marco writes to Luisa Lattes, he makes the change explicit. He says that raising the new man is now his mission and identifies that figure as the eight-year-old girl sleeping under his roof. The apparent contradiction is deliberate: the “new man” is a girl who will become a woman. He tells Luisa that his first and last thoughts are now for Miraijin, and that the thoughts between them are for her too. In the same letter, he says that he has strength only for this mission and that it is the only way he can live. He also ends his correspondence with Luisa, despite having loved her for forty years and thought of her every day. His new priority does not erase that history, but it changes the order of his attachments.

Miraijin’s care for Marco eventually reverses their roles. In a letter addressed to her grandfather, she retracts what she told him the previous day: she had cried all the way home, felt desperate, and could not sleep, but says she has now understood and is ready. She tells him that he has only given to her, and that if he asks her for something once—even something enormous—she will give it to him. She has suspended her program and will return to him in a few days, proud of his courage and of the purity of his decision. She promises that he need not manage the arrangements himself: Oscar knows the right people, and what Marco wants will happen. Her response is not effortless agreement; the distress and sleeplessness come first. Her decision to help follows that struggle and the recognition of what he has given her.

Final Gathering and Significance

Miraijin also takes responsibility for bringing people together around Marco near the end of his life. The idea of inviting them unsettles him: he has not heard from Luisa in years, and his relationship with Giacomo has also long been estranged. He remembers that he ended things with Luisa and did not answer her later letters, while with Giacomo he wrote for years without receiving a reply before giving up. He is unsure whether he wants the reunion, and recalls the saying Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis as a description of his own feeling that he has no claim to want anything. Miraijin reframes the invitation as something not only for him, but for those who remain. Once he accepts that it might be a gift to them, his helplessness recedes.

Twelve days before the scene described, the living room at Piazza Savonarola has been transformed into a hospital room, and Miraijin has somehow arranged for the guests to come at short notice. Giacomo travels from the United States, Luisa from Paris, and Marina and Greta from Germany; Dr. Carradori comes from Lampedusa. Miraijin’s boyfriend Oscar arrives from Barcelona, along with Rodrigo, the nurse who will physically carry out the procedure, and three members of the Spanish escort. The gathering makes the house at Bolgheri unusually international. Guido, the nurse who cared for Marco in Florence, cannot come because his disabled mother needs him; his absence also spares the family from having to explain the decision to someone whose religious convictions would make him unlikely to approve. He understands from Marco’s decision not to restart treatment and to move to the sea at the end of May that Marco will not return, and cries at their farewell.

Miraijin’s importance to the novel rests on the tension between a future imagined for her and the choices she makes in the present. Adele casts her as the beginning of a new humanity; Marco first treats that vision as a loving fantasy, then adopts it as the answer to grief and the organizing purpose of his remaining life. Yet Miraijin is not only a symbol passed from mother to grandfather. She struggles, decides, suspends her program, and acts on her own understanding of what Marco has given her. The child he undertook to raise becomes the person who can answer him in return, and the one who gathers a scattered family for a final meeting.