The person of the future

The person of the future is Adele Carrera’s name for the future she imagines through her daughter, Miraijin. The idea turns a private birth into a hope directed toward history: in a world extending from the early 1970s into a gloomy near future, the child is presented as the fruit of Marco Carrera’s resilience and as the new human being who may change what comes next.

Name and Meaning

Miraijin means “the Man of the Future” in Japanese. Adele had settled on both the name and its future-facing meaning by the time she told her father she was pregnant. She also imagined that the child would arrive on a special day, making the name, the child’s expected future, and the date of birth part of one deliberate conception.

Birth and Family

Miraijin was born on October 20, 2010, a date Adele noticed as 20.10.2010. When Marco asked who the father was, Adele did not identify one; she had decided that the father was not part of the child’s life, and Marco accepted that pressing the question would not change her decision. The future she envisioned was therefore not grounded in a conventional account of parentage, but in her determination to have and raise the child on her own terms.

Marco’s Place in the Future

Adele told Marco that Miraijin would be the new person of the future. Marco was initially uncertain about the fatherless pregnancy, but he had learned to accept the unexpected rather than impose his will. He had raised Adele to develop her own point of view and to feel free, and her decision put that commitment into practice. His acceptance deepened into a changed family arrangement: although he had expected his daughter eventually to leave, Adele told him she wanted to stay with him and that he could be with Miraijin too.

Marco’s role connects the concept to the novel’s central image of resilience. The foreword describes him as a hummingbird, repeatedly finding a way to remain steady through loss; Miraijin is the child in whom the consequence of that endurance becomes visible. The future is not offered as an abstract promise detached from suffering, but as a life that grows out of the bonds Marco and Adele sustain.

Narrative Significance

The concept gathers private hope and historical uncertainty into a single figure. The novel’s frame reaches from the early 1970s toward a gloomy near future, while its foreword identifies Miraijin as the child who will be the new human being. That contrast gives Adele’s naming an enlarged significance: the future is imagined not as guaranteed progress, but as a possibility entrusted to a particular child and shaped by the family’s choices. The account establishes the aspiration attached to Miraijin without specifying what kind of society she will create or how that future will unfold.