Adele—Miraijin

Adele’s bond with Miraijin is shaped by a conviction she repeats without hesitation: her daughter will be the new human being, and humanity will begin again through her. What begins as Adele’s faith becomes the purpose Marco embraces after her death, turning his responsibility to raise Miraijin into the answer he finds to a life marked by loss.

Adele’s conviction

While Adele is alive, there is no dispute between her and Marco about Miraijin’s future. She says repeatedly that humanity will start over from the child, and Marco echoes her claim. At the time, however, he does not share its full seriousness: he thinks of it as a fantasy that helps Adele endure what she has suffered, and plays along with the idea much as he once played with her belief in the thread attached to her back. His apparent agreement is affectionate but condescending; he regards the prophecy as a coping story rather than a truth.

After Adele’s death

Adele dies too soon, leaving Marco unprepared for the void. He continues, as he has through earlier upheavals, by standing amid the wreckage rather than deciding what to do next. But remaining upright is no longer enough. For a time he lives recklessly, following Dr. Carradori’s advice, while concentrating on caring for Miraijin and taking hold of the life he has left. His care is imperfect, including nights when he plays while the child sleeps in a hammock, yet this period helps him reach a decisive understanding.

That change comes when Marco gives up the enormous winnings from a bloody poker duel with his friend Dami Tamburini. He asks why he has endured so many blows: escaping a plane crash, losing his sister, undergoing a terrible divorce, ending his father’s life, and burying a daughter who was only twenty-two. He now answers those questions through Miraijin. Adele’s insistence that the child will renew humanity is no longer, for him, merely a comforting fantasy; he believes that his suffering has served the purpose of bringing the new human being into the world and raising her.

Inheritance and resemblance

Miraijin’s significance to Marco is not only an idea inherited from her mother. Her body carries marks that make her both startlingly unfamiliar and intimately connected to the family: her eyes recall Irene’s, her athletic build recalls Adele’s development, and her dimple resembles Giacomo’s. Most affecting to Marco is a tiny mole between the little and ring fingers of Miraijin’s right hand, matching the marks on his own hand and Adele’s. Marco and Adele used to place their hands together to compare them, including while they were immersed in the hospital tub during Miraijin’s birth; Marco can continue the gesture with his granddaughter.

The shared mole makes Adele’s bond with Miraijin legible as something carried forward in the smallest physical detail. In Marco’s understanding, the child’s arrival does not erase the people who are gone: family resemblance allows their presence to persist in her, while Adele’s words give that continuity a future-facing meaning.

The promise and its meaning

Marco’s belief is reinforced by the way Miraijin seems to find the right response to each new experience. As a baby, she cries, sleeps, and learns at the appropriate times; as she grows, she takes to activities and situations with an ease that impresses instructors. Her occasional departures from convention appear not as failures but as better ways of doing things. Marco reads this unusual capacity to persuade and be imitated as evidence that Adele’s vision may be true.

The relationship therefore changes in meaning across the novel’s account: Adele’s certainty first functions as a source of hope that Marco privately treats as indulgence, then survives her death as the framework through which he understands his own painful past. Miraijin becomes, for him, both the daughter Adele believed in and the person he has been entrusted to raise. The promise of a new beginning binds their lives together without making loss disappear; instead, it gives Marco’s grief a task and a direction.