Adele

Adele, Marco Carrera’s daughter and Miraijin’s mother, is central to the purpose Marco discovers after her death. She had insisted that Miraijin would be a new beginning for humanity; Marco first humored this conviction, but later came to believe it himself. Her brief relationship with Greta and the bond Greta formed with Miraijin also shape the family’s future: Marco’s efforts to keep them close help ensure that his granddaughter will not be alone.

Identity and conviction

While Adele is alive, the meaning she assigns to Miraijin is beyond dispute. She repeatedly tells Marco that humanity will start over with her child. Marco echoes the claim, but at first does so indulgently, comparing his response to the way he once played along with Adele’s belief that a thread was attached to her back. He thinks her idea may be a fantasy that helps her endure what she has suffered: fate has dealt her blows, and she imagines that she will bring forth a new human being in return.

That gap between Adele’s certainty and Marco’s private skepticism matters. Her claim is not initially his considered doctrine; he treats it as something that supports his daughter, rather than as a truth he must adopt. Yet after she is gone, the words remain. The conviction he had once repeated for her becomes the language through which he understands his own life and responsibility.

Death and Marco’s changed understanding

Adele dies too soon, leaving Marco unprepared for the emptiness of her absence. His habitual response to catastrophe is to remain standing amid its aftermath, and after her death he again finds himself living in the figurative crater. This time, simply enduring is not enough. Following Dr. Carradori’s advice, he spends a period living recklessly, while continuing to care for Miraijin and trying to seize what remains of his own life. Marco’s account does not present this as exemplary caregiving, but as part of the unsettled period that precedes a decisive change in understanding.

That change comes when Marco gives up the enormous winnings from a hard-fought poker duel with his friend Dami Tamburini. The choice prompts him to ask why he has undergone so much: 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 who was only twenty-two. He reads these losses not as proof that suffering was deserved, but as the ground on which a different future might be built. The accumulated pain becomes, in his understanding, the foundation for the world Miraijin may change.

Motherhood and the future Miraijin represents

Marco’s answer is the name Miraijin. He comes to believe that Adele was right: her daughter is the new human being, and humanity will begin again through her. What he once treated as a consoling fantasy becomes a purpose that organizes his experience of loss. In his reckoning, he has suffered so much in order to bring this new person into the world, but only after enduring the injuries of an outrageous fate. Adele’s faith thus continues beyond her lifetime, transformed into Marco’s own conviction and commitment to raise her child.

The belief also gains force from Marco’s daily perception of Miraijin as extraordinary. He is an ophthalmologist and visual expert of forty years’ experience, convinced that he has seen every kind of eye, yet Miraijin’s eyes make him feel as though he were seeing Earth from space for the first time. He finds an old photograph of an American friend’s long-haired Ragdoll cat, Jagger, whose eyes had reminded him of hers, but the comparison fails: the cat was white, while Miraijin is dark-skinned. The detail makes clear that Marco’s faith is tied not only to Adele’s words but also to his intense attention to the child before him.

Family bonds and Adele’s continuing place

Adele had only a short time to become close to Greta, her sister, before she died. Even so, an intense bond developed between Greta and Miraijin, who became close as if they were sisters. Marco helped make that relationship possible by taking his granddaughter to Germany over the years so that she could spend time with Greta and her grandmother. With Marina’s condition limiting the support she can offer, those visits leave Miraijin with a lasting connection to her mother’s family. Greta’s decision to stay rather than leave confirms the practical importance of that bond in the family’s later life.

At the close, Adele remains among the people Marco recalls as he faces his own death. Her name appears alongside Irene, his father, his mother, and Santa in his inward leave-taking. The spare recurrence gives no further account of Adele’s final moments; instead, it places her among the dead who remain present to him. Her decisive legacy is carried forward through Miraijin, through Marco’s care for the child, and through a conviction that turns Adele’s once-dismissed belief into the meaning he finally gives to his survival and grief.