book events – Emily Midorikawa

For me at least, it’s hard to believe that A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – the novel I began while I was living in Japan in the early 2000s – will be released by Manilla Press in a month’s time. You can preorder it now (as a hardback, ebook or audiobook), and even take an early peek by requesting a proof on NetGalley.

For North American readers, the ebook of the novel will be published by Open Road Integrated Media on 4 August and is also available for preordering now. Paperback and audiobook versions will follow.

If you’d like to hear me talking in person about A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, it would be great to see you at one of my UK book tour events this summer. A date recently added is the Bàrd Debuts night at Bàrd Books in London on Wednesday 22 July, where I’ll be appearing with a group of exciting new authors. I’ll also be at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July and Collected in Durham on Wednesday 29 July. I will be adding more dates to my Events page soon.

These public gatherings are a far cry indeed from the solitary headspace in which the first fragments of my novel began to emerge over two decades ago. When the characters and locations of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing started to appear to me in flickering snapshots, I was a young English language teacher in my early twenties, living alone in a tiny studio flat in the Japanese city of Matsuyama.

To be clear, this wasn’t an isolated existence in any real sense of the word. My job teaching English in local high schools involved regular interactions with Japanese students and coworkers, and there were several other young expatriate teachers living within the same city. My flat was situated in a residential area. I could frequently hear conversations humming through the walls of neighbouring apartments; noise from the warehouse next door; traffic flowing along the road beyond. Nonetheless, looking back, it’s striking how alone I was there in comparison to how it would have been if I’d arrived at that address today.

In my flat, I had a landline telephone, a television, a radio. But making calls to family and friends in Britain was expensive, and, at least initially, there were few people in Japan that I could ring for a chat. My limited Japanese language meant I could make little sense of the TV. Speech on the radio, with no visuals to help, was even more mystifying. Typically for the era, I had no home internet connection. For part of my time in Matsuyama I did own a mobile phone, which I used for making calls and sending texts; that’s all. It had a colour camera, capable of capturing grainy, pixelated images, and seemed impossibly modern at the time. But it was definitely not a smartphone.

My location and living set-up differed in key ways from that of Anna, the protagonist of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. Anna lives in Osaka, a much bigger city than Matsuyama. Rather than living alone, she has a flatmate, the enigmatic Charlotte – better known as Loll – with whom Anna develops an intense friendship. On the other hand, the novel’s action takes place in roughly the same period that I lived in Japan, and Anna’s experiences – as a British-Japanese young woman uprooted to a culture she only partially knows – share some similarities with my own.

In A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, Anna’s feelings of isolation contribute to the ease with which she falls so quickly under her glamorous flatmate’s spell. Loll is a nightclub hostess with a mysterious past, someone who – unlike the seemingly more cautious Anna – is reckless and impulsive, at least as far as first appearances go. When, part way through the novel, Loll disappears, Anna’s attempts to discover the fate of her friend are hindered by the many secrets Loll kept, which begin to unfurl as soon as she vanishes from view.

Although this was of course not apparent to me when I began drafting the book, the process of revising it over the past two years has highlighted the extent to which Anna’s efforts to find out what happened to her friend are impeded by the technology available to her at the time. When Loll goes missing, Anna struggles to quickly spread the word; to locate individuals who might be able to help in her search; even to find her way around Osaka in an era of often unreliable paper maps, written in a language she can barely read.

In a much lower-stakes way, I encountered all of these kinds of issues during the two years I spent living in the Japan of the early aughts. But in my case, such limitations provided not painful restrictions but rather important opportunities to begin to hone my craft.

With no access to an endless library of on-line content, no opportunities for endless phone scrolling, I filled the many hours I spent alone in my flat listening to music on CDs, cooking whatever I felt like eating, watching English-language films on video cassettes; mixing cocktails for one and feeling decadent about it; reading voraciously and daydreaming.

What I read, in the main, were translated novels by Japanese authors – mostly contemporary figures. My Japanese mum – who, unlike Anna’s absent mother, was very much a part of my life – had previously introduced me to several Japanese works of the Heian period (Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, for instance). But, prior to arriving in Japan as a young graduate, I’d known very little about modern Japanese fiction. It’s strange to recall that there was a time when British bookshops were not full of Japanese books catering to all manner of tastes from the milieux of the most gruesome thrillers to that of cosy cafés and wandering cats.

Travelling, and dreaming, as an apprentice writer in the early 2000s. (Note: this wasn’t my studio flat!)

It was thrilling to discover a whole new world of books and to have seemingly endless time to explore them.

As to what I used to daydream about, there were so many things: the future; the past; a lot about love; and my hopes of becoming a better writer. As time went on, though, I found myself dreaming more and more about the hazy, half-formed Osaka setting of my novel-in-embryo. And eventually I would take those dreams and begin, hesitantly, to type sentences on a laptop – one that functioned as little more than an old-fashioned word processor, and which, like so many aspects of my life back then, felt pleasingly disconnected from the rest of the world.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published as a hardbook, ebook and audiobook by Manilla Press on 23 July. UK copies are available for pre-ordering from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Bookshop.Org, Amazon, or your favourite independent bookshop.

The US e-book is available for pre-ordering from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.Org, Amazon and independent bookstores. Audiobook and paperback versions to follow.

Tickets for these upcoming events are available at the following links: Bàrd Debuts at Bàrd Books (Wednesday 22 July), Blackwells, Manchester (Thursday 23 July) and Collected in Durham (Wednesday 29 July).

If you would like to make sure you receive my next monthly essay, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

There are just under three months to go until A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing, the novel I began over twenty years ago, will be published in the UK. I’ll be back in Britain for much of the summer and will be marking publication day with an event at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July. I will be in conversation with Susan Barker, author of the highly acclaimed literary horror novel Old Soul among other brilliant books.

I still sometimes struggle to comprehend that I am in this position at all – preparing to speak at public events about a novel I’d once thought would never see the light of day. Tickets are available here. If you can make it to Manchester, I would love to see you at Blackwell’s!

As I wrote last month, I began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing when I was in my early twenties and working as an English language teacher in Japan. After returning to the UK, aged 23, I initially moved back to the town where I grew up, took a part-time secretarial job that left me ample time to keep working on my novel, and began applying to university creative writing programmes.

Following an acceptance to UEA’s famous MA course, I packed the bag containing my laptop and the loose printed pages of my novel-in-progress with a great deal of nervous excitement. But my time at UEA, though wonderful in many ways, would turn out to be more emotionally difficult than I’d anticipated.

Halfway through the year, my father died. Losing him when I was still only in my mid-twenties, had a profound effect on me. Afterwards I never felt young in the same way again, and, looking back, I can see how the grief I felt transformed the way I wrote about loss in my book.

By the time I left UEA, I had a scrappy first draft. An extract published in that year’s course anthology attracted the interest of a couple of literary agents, but it didn’t lead to any formal offers of representation, much less to a publishing deal.

Still, I kept going, (mostly) firm in my belief that – although aspects of my novel still needed lots of work – I had a story worth telling. Eventually, a different agent took me on and, after revising the manuscript extensively with her, I steeled myself as it went out on mass submission to publishers. Some editors showed an interest in the book’s urban Japanese setting; my depictions of hostess bars; and the central storyline of an intense friendship between two young women, one of whom suddenly disappears. But, although I seemed to get close on a few occasions, it didn’t lead to a publishing contract.

By this stage, I had been living with A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing for a long time – around eight years in fact. Having already committed so much time and energy to the novel, it was very difficult to put it aside. Dejectedly, I did, though, to concentrate on other writing projects, including various collaborations with Emma Claire Sweeney, whose friendship – as I described in my March post – has been of the utmost importance to me.

In 2012, my mother died. I was 32, still relatively young to have lost both my parents. Again, as in the case of my dad’s passing, the long shadow cast by Mum’s death would go on to affect the ways in which I approached the theme of loss in my novel when I unexpectedly found myself returning to work on it some years into the future.

During the decade and more when A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing largely languished in a metaphorical bottom drawer, I occasionally dusted off the draft to enter it into competitions for unpublished writers. My novel had some success with the SI Leeds Literary Prize and Yeovil Literary Prize. Then in 2015, it made the shortlist for the influential Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. At that year’s prize ceremony, to which I took Emma as my guest, I was stunned to hear my name announced as the winner.

**Being announced as the 2015 winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize by Professor Janet Todd OBE**
**(Image courtesy of Lucy Cavendish College**)

It is hard to overstate the impact of these small victories on my confidence at a time when my belief that A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing would ever be published was at an all-time low. These wins opened doors, offered unexpected opportunities and led to lasting friendships with fellow shortlistees and other people associated with the awards.

Such prizes also helped me to be taken more seriously when I was pitching proposals for my two nonfiction books, A Secret Sisterhood (cowritten with Emma Claire Sweeney) and Out of the Shadows, published in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Both were historical group biographies. I relished the research and writing of these works, but after Out of the Shadows came out I decided that I wanted to give fiction another go.

As the mother of two small children by then, my progress was slow and steady. But I had begun a new novel when, completely out of the blue, in early 2024, I received word from my agent that that an editor who’d read the manuscript of A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing some time ago was asking if it was still available.

In the years since she had begun representing me as a writer, my agent (whose commitment to this novel has been extraordinary) had continued to show my manuscript to editors from time to time. As before, some had shown an interest but nothing had ever worked out. So, although I was happy for this editor to take another look at the work, I didn’t hold out much hope.

You can imagine my amazement then when, two decades after I first began writing my novel, I found myself signing a publishing contract at last – and being faced with the somewhat daunting prospect of returning, in mid-life, to a book I originally conceived as a young woman.

The process of revising the manuscript for publication has been surprising, challenging and illuminating – and more than a little uncanny at times. There has also been pleasure in meeting the writer I once was on the page, and in the realisation that the passage of time has, in fact, enriched the story I am able to tell.

In May, I will explore what it’s like to come back to a creative work after a long break. If you would like to make sure you receive this next monthly post, and others like it, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing will be published by Manilla Press on 23 July 2026 and is available for pre-ordering now.

Tickets for my Blackwells, Manchester event with Susan Barker are available here.

Tag: book events

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