Japan

Japan enters the novel not as a place Marco visits, but as a set of stories, practices, and objects through which he tries to understand his daughter’s choices and the child she is about to have. It gives Miraijin her name, supplies a language for the different ways of threading a needle, and lends Marco a Japanese hammock in which he can resist mourning’s command to stay home. Its significance lies in this movement between distant cultural knowledge and intimate, practical life: Japan becomes a way to imagine a future that Marco cannot control, and then a resource for carrying on within the present.

A name and a future

When Adele explains the name Miraijin, she gives Marco more than its translation. The name combines the Japanese elements for “future” and “person”; the first, mirai, joins the sense of “not yet” to that of “arrived.” The future is therefore carried in a word that names someone who has not yet arrived. Adele had taken the name from Miraijin Chaos, a manga saga by Osamu Tezuka, whose biography and creative work become part of the account she shares with her father.

The name is also a declaration of how Adele understands her child. Miraijin is to be the “Man of the Future,” a figure oriented toward what has not yet come rather than toward the missing identity of the child’s father. Marco can accept that Adele’s decision has its own logic without ceasing to find it difficult. Japan offers him a way to approach that logic: not by resolving the uncertainty, but by placing the unborn child inside an imagined future large enough to hold it.

Marco is moved by Tezuka’s character and by the photograph Adele keeps in her diary, but this response has limits. He does not take up her recommendation to read the comics: they are in English, and he has never liked manga. The distinction matters. Japan draws his interest through Adele and her plans, yet it does not instantly remake his tastes or erase the distance between father and daughter. His attachment to the idea of Miraijin is more readily formed than his appetite for the stories that produced it.

Japan in Adele’s circle

Marco’s understanding changes as Adele’s friends begin visiting her at home. Because pregnancy prevents Adele from joining their surfing and climbing excursions, the friends come to dinner instead. Marco has not seen them in this indoor, everyday setting before; their manners and affection for Adele reassure him that they are not defined solely by physical daring. He also discovers how centrally Japan figures in their interests.

One friend, Gigio Dithmar of Schmidveiller, nicknamed Briciola, is especially compelling to Marco. Short, light, and gifted at climbing, Briciola speaks with ease about samurai, shogunates, Murakami, Kurosawa, martial arts, manga, robotics, Shintoism, sushi, and the tea ceremony. He is an engineering student whose knowledge has come from private enthusiasm rather than formal study of Japan. His conversation makes cultural curiosity contagious: Marco listens, and begins to see Japan as one of the sources of the group’s shared outlook.

Briciola’s image also resonates with Marco’s own. His friends still call him a hummingbird, despite the growth spurt brought on by hormone treatment; Briciola’s smallness gives the nickname a fresh point of comparison. Marco sees him as a possible male figure of reference for Miraijin, alongside himself and Tezuka. He briefly wonders whether Briciola, or another young man in the group, might be the child’s father. The friends’ unforced manner toward Adele helps quiet that suspicion. The group does not treat paternity as a secret that must be solved, and Marco comes to understand that, for Adele and her friends, the father’s identity is beside the point.

The thread turned inward

Briciola gives Marco a striking image for the cultural difference he thinks may have helped draw Adele toward Japan. In the West, he says, a person pushes thread through a needle’s eye from the chest outward; in Japan, the thread is brought from the outside toward the chest. The distinction translates cultural difference into a bodily action and an image of direction. For Marco, still searching for clues to his daughter’s choice, it offers a provisional explanation: Japan can represent an approach that begins outside the self and moves inward.

That image connects Japan to the larger thread motif associated with Adele, but it does not settle the meaning of her decision. Marco continues to feel that the matter is more complicated than the philosophy his daughter’s friends seem to accept. At dinner, he quotes the verse, “To go where you don't know / you have to go through where you don't know.” The line makes an impression because it fits their willingness to enter an uncertain future, even as Marco remains conscious of his resistance. Japan, in this conversation, is not a final answer but a vocabulary for moving toward what cannot be known in advance.

The hammock as a practical rebellion

Later, Japan’s significance becomes tangible through an object. Dr. Carradori finds a hammock in a Munich airport sports shop while waiting for a flight and buys it for Marco. It is a Japanese hammock with a folding, portable steel support, small enough when packed to take up about the space of a tennis bag. The particular object connects to Miraijin’s Japanese name, but it also answers a practical difficulty: Marco wants to keep playing tennis without leaving his young granddaughter behind.

Carradori understands that grief can impose a punishing ritual of withdrawal. He hopes the hammock will help Marco rebel against that ritual, even if it cannot directly undo the grief itself. Marco can take Miraijin with him rather than give up the pleasures of life or leave her with a babysitter. The solution is, in one sense, unnecessary: a stroller already exists, and a hammock does not solve the desperation he carries. Yet its oddness is precisely what allows Marco to approach the problem indirectly. The Japanese object, its portability, and its association with the child’s name gather into an improvised permission to act.

Marco takes Miraijin to tennis tournaments around Tuscany, first in the over-fifty category and then over fifty-five, as well as in doubles. He sets up the hammock on the court, beneath the pressure balloon in winter, puts the sleeping child in it, and plays while she rests. The pattern turns the hammock from a gift into a working part of their life together. Japan’s role is no longer only to furnish an imagined future or an interpretive metaphor: through an object carried and assembled, it helps Marco remain present to the living child while refusing grief’s demand for total retreat.