The New Man

“The New Man” is the name Adele Carrera gives to a future embodied by her daughter, Miraijin. What begins as Adele’s firm conviction becomes, after Adele’s death, the purpose Marco Carrera finds in a life marked by sudden change and grief: raising Miraijin, whom he comes to believe was born to help humanity begin again.

Naming a Future

Miraijin was born on October 20, 2010, a date Adele recognized as 20.10.2010. The name and date, the narrative explains, were settled before the birth, from the time Adele told Marco she was pregnant. She said that her child would be the new man, the Man of the Future, and would arrive on a special day. The Japanese name Miraijin carries that meaning in the novel, joining a personal name to a claim about what might come after the present.

When Marco asked who the father was, Adele did not answer. Her decision was that the father was not part of the story, and Marco learned not to insist or impose his expectations. Her choice establishes the future she imagines on her own terms: Miraijin’s significance does not depend on a disclosed father or on a conventional account of family. Marco’s task is not to resolve the unanswered question but to accept the child and the life Adele intends to build around her.

Adele’s declaration also takes on added weight because she presents it with certainty. She tells Marco that humanity will begin again through her child. For a time, he does not share that belief as a literal account of destiny. He indulges Adele’s conviction, much as he once played along with her belief that a thread attached her to the wall. The future she names is therefore both a promise Adele holds to and an idea Marco initially treats as a sustaining fantasy.

Marco’s Unexpected Responsibility

Marco had prepared himself for Adele to leave home and make an independent life. Instead, after becoming a mother, she tells him that she intends to stay with him and that he can be part of Miraijin’s life. She calls him a magnificent father, past and present, and asks him to remain with her and the child. Her candor unsettles him, but it also changes what he understands his role to be: rather than watching his daughter depart, he is asked to help raise the next generation.

His feelings toward Adele are complex. He loves her profoundly, feels pity for what she has endured, and carries guilt that she did not have the ordinary life he believes every child should be able to expect. He also worries about her stability. A thread-related disturbance had reappeared in Munich during the annus horribilis, but after Adele moved to Florence it disappeared; across the following nine years she showed no sign of detachment from reality. That history shadows Marco’s response to her vision of Miraijin’s destiny: he has reason to take Adele’s vulnerability seriously even while recognizing the comfort and meaning her belief provides.

Marco describes the years of caring for Adele and Miraijin as a life with a purpose: delivering the new man to the world, a privilege that has come to him through pain. The language of privilege does not erase the cost. It gives his daily work a direction, making the care he provides for Miraijin inseparable from the future Adele named for her.

From Adele’s Conviction to Marco’s Mission

The idea becomes explicit in Marco’s final letter to Luisa Lattes. He tells Luisa that his mission is to raise the new man, and clarifies the apparent contradiction in the title: the new man is the eight-year-old girl sleeping under his roof. She will become a woman; nevertheless, Adele’s phrase and Marco’s sense of purpose persist. The name is not a description of Miraijin’s present age or gender but a claim about what she may mean for the future.

The letter also records a decisive change in Marco’s attachments. He tells Luisa that for forty years she had been the first and last person on his mind each day. Now his first thought is for Miraijin, his last is still for her, and the thoughts between belong to her as well. He says that this is the only way he can live. The future-facing mission is thus not an abstract creed detached from intimate life: it changes how Marco understands love, obligation, and the limits of the relationship he has carried for decades.

Marco’s account of his return to gambling throws the mission into sharper relief. As his poker winnings rose, he imagined replacing his car, travelling to luxury destinations, hiring servants, or retiring from the work to which he had devoted thirty-five years. These fantasies made his actual life seem inadequate, although, he explains, he did not truly want the alternatives. He likes his life because it has a purpose: caring for Miraijin and bringing the new man into the world. The imagined rewards of winning reveal the gap between what gambling tempts him to picture and what he regards as meaningful.

Loss, Recognition, and Purpose

While Adele is alive, Marco says, her conviction that humanity begins again with Miraijin is never in dispute. He repeats it too, though at first he does so partly out of indulgence toward Adele. After her death, the belief no longer belongs only to her. Marco is left unprepared for the emptiness, and simply enduring the aftermath is not enough; he needs a stronger reason to continue. For a time he lives wildly, following advice from Dr. Carradori, while concentrating on caring for Miraijin and living the time he has left.

The turning point comes when Marco gives up the enormous poker winnings from a brutal game against his friend Dami Tamburini. In the account that follows, surrendering the money prompts him to ask why the defining blows of his life have happened to him. The questions gather together losses and reversals: escaping a plane crash, losing his sister, enduring a terrible divorce, ending his father’s life, and burying his twenty-two-year-old daughter. These experiences do not become less painful; Marco reads them differently, as the past that has led him to Miraijin.

At last he accepts Adele’s claim as his own. He believes that Miraijin was the new man from the moment she was conceived and that she was born to change the world. His account casts what he has suffered as the price, or preparation, of the privilege of raising her. This conviction completes the pattern of a life in which long periods of stillness are broken by abrupt transitions into an unfamiliar existence. Rather than asking why before an answer is possible, Marco waits until the darkest moment; the name Miraijin then becomes the answer that allows him to keep moving.

Meaning and Limits of the Ideal

The title’s gendered language is deliberately unsettled by its referent. “The New Man” is Miraijin, a girl who will become a woman. Adele’s words do not require Miraijin to become male; they make her the bearer of a future imagined beyond the usual expectation that the new generation simply repeat the old one. Marco’s phrasing preserves the title while naming the child it means, so that its force lies in the future entrusted to her rather than in a literal transformation of gender.

The novel holds the promise and its human source together. Adele’s declaration gives her life with Miraijin a sustaining shape; Marco initially treats it with tenderness rather than certainty. Only after losing Adele and relinquishing his winnings does he embrace the claim without reservation. The idea becomes powerful not because the narrative proves a future society will be remade, but because it gives Marco a way to understand care as his responsibility and survival as service to someone who will outlive him.

In that sense, “The New Man” is both Miraijin’s designation and Marco’s answer to grief. It gathers his accumulated losses into a purpose, but does not cancel them or make them interchangeable. The future he can act upon is concrete: the child under his roof, whose upbringing he accepts as his mission. The grand hope of humanity beginning again rests, in the end, on the intimate work of raising her.