Marco Carrera and Miraijin's grandfather-granddaughter relationship

Marco Carrera and Miraijin’s grandfather-granddaughter relationship is both an intimate daily bond and the means by which Marco survives the death of his daughter, Adele. Miraijin is his granddaughter, but Marco describes himself as also being a kind of father to her: she has grown up in the same household with him and Adele, and after Adele dies, his care for the child gives him a reason to remain alive and a practical way to resist grief.

Identity and Early Bond

Miraijin is born to Adele when Adele is twenty. Adele does not disclose who the father is, and Marco accepts her decision to have the child without news of the father. He does not make his acceptance conditional on an explanation; he takes on the child’s presence as part of the family’s life.

When Marco later tells Dr. Carradori about Miraijin, he describes her as a strikingly distinct child, with Japanese features, curly hair, and blue eyes, and as a meeting of African, Asian, and European ancestry. At two, she speaks and understands, and draws remarkably well. The details establish not only Marco’s pride in her, but also the attentive intimacy of his account: he presents her as a person already becoming herself, rather than simply as a comfort to her grandfather.

Miraijin grows up with her mother and Marco because the three live together. Marco explicitly tells Carradori that he is her grandfather and also, in a sense, her father. This dual role is not a formal change in kinship but a description of the care and shared life that make their bond central to the household.

Adele’s Death and Marco’s Grief

Before Adele’s death, Marco’s life with Miraijin is part of the stability he has tried to provide his daughter. Adele’s childhood had been marked by upheaval between Italy and Germany and by her mother’s illness. As an adult, Adele became dependable and worked and studied in periods of intense effort; when she needed to recharge in nature, Marco stayed home with Miraijin. In this arrangement, he looked after the child while allowing Adele the space she needed, and understood his role as helping her find a stability she had not known growing up.

Adele’s death overturns that arrangement. The wider Carrera family has already been fractured by earlier losses and estrangement, and Marco is left to bear the loss of his daughter. In the afternoon, on a Sunday in autumn, he receives the phone call that confirms the tragedy. The account describes him as feeling that his life has been reduced to nothing; at that moment Miraijin, then two years and a month old, is asleep with her head on his knees. When she wakes and smiles, her presence interrupts his despair. The narrative makes the relationship’s immediate consequence unmistakable: Marco understands that he must go on because Miraijin is there and needs him.

In speaking with Carradori, Marco says that without Miraijin he would already have thrown himself into a river. Carradori insists that the child’s danger and needs cannot be displaced by Marco’s crisis, invoking the airplane oxygen-mask rule: a person must first put on their own mask, then help the children. Marco repeats the rule, and Carradori applies it to his situation: he cannot abandon himself, because Miraijin is there. The exchange frames his survival not as the disappearance of grief but as an obligation made concrete by his relationship with his granddaughter.

Care After Loss

Carradori helps Marco reconnect with Marina, Adele’s mother and his former wife, by travelling to the clinic in Upper Bavaria where Marina is hospitalized and telling her of Adele’s death. In the name of their granddaughter, Marco and Marina begin seeing one another again. Marco takes Miraijin to Germany to visit Marina and Greta, Marina’s other daughter, staying with them in the clinic or its garden and sometimes taking them for walks in a nearby park. He no longer feels hostility towards Marina; he feels pity for the reduced life she leads and recognizes that, like him, she has become a parent who has lost a child.

These visits extend a task Adele had carried out with persistence and tenderness while alive: maintaining a connection between Miraijin and her maternal family. After Adele’s death, Marco takes up that responsibility as a kind of inheritance. The relationship with Miraijin thus does more than keep him from being alone; it gives his grief a direction, drawing him back into contact with people from whom he had become estranged.

A Life Reorganized Around Miraijin

Marco’s care for Miraijin also changes what pleasure and work can look like. After Adele’s death, Carradori recommends that he keep doing things he enjoys rather than let mourning paralyze him. Marco answers in practical terms: he wants to be with the child and cannot leave her with someone else in order to play tennis. Carradori responds by bringing him a small Japanese-made hammock with a folding stand, portable enough to assemble in two minutes. Its usefulness allows Marco to bring Miraijin along instead of treating caregiving and recreation as mutually exclusive.

Marco takes the child to tennis tournaments across Tuscany, including doubles matches against former opponents. He sets up the hammock beside the court, sometimes under a pressure balloon in winter, and puts Miraijin in it when she has fallen asleep in the car, wrapping her in a blanket when necessary. He plays while she sleeps, then packs the equipment and takes her home. The child’s presence does not end his mourning; rather, it reshapes his activities so that he can remain responsible for her while recovering some of his own life.

He also takes Miraijin to conferences in Florence, Prato, and Chianciano Terme, where he speaks about subjects that bring together his interests in the eye, photography, and animals. At times she sits beside him in the front row while he speaks. He skips the aperitifs and formal dinners afterward, then dismantles the hammock and goes home with her. Across these routines, their relationship is shown through repeated practical choices: Marco carries, assembles, and packs what he needs so the child can accompany him.

Significance of the Relationship

Miraijin’s bond with Marco turns the aftermath of Adele’s death into a life of continuing care. The child does not replace Adele, nor does her presence make the loss less real. Instead, Marco’s grandfatherly and partly paternal role gives him a reason to keep living, reconnect with Marina, and pursue work and recreation in forms compatible with looking after Miraijin. Their relationship is therefore both an inheritance from Adele’s family life and a new responsibility Marco chooses to carry forward.