Tag: Manilla Press

The Headspace to Dream: starting out as a writer in a world offline

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 2 Comments

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.

The North American cover

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.

Retrieving an Abandoned Book from a Bottom Drawer

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 2 Comments

Last month, I mentioned that I’ll be marking UK publication day for my debut novel A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing with an event at Blackwell’s, Manchester on Thursday 23 July. I’m now delighted to be able to let you know that I’ll also be giving a talk at the fantastic independent bookshop Collected in Durham on Wednesday 29 July, so if you can’t make it to Manchester (or even if you can) I’d love to see you in Durham.

Poster for my event at Collected Books on their shop noticeboard

I’ll be adding more bookings to my events page soon and will continue to share news about them through this newsletter and on Instagram, Threads and Bluesky.

Speaking of bookshop events, here, on the other side of the Atlantic, I recently attended a fascinating talk at Lost City Books in Washington DC. Kanako Nishi, author of the novel Sakura, was appearing on a panel with her literary translator, Allison Markin Powell.

In Sakura, Nishi paints a loving picture of a close-knit Japanese working-class family that suddenly finds itself thrown into a state of shocking emotional turmoil. It was originally published in Japan in 2005, but only came out in English translation this year. Although Nishi’s publishing journey doesn’t exactly mirror mine, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a marked similarity between our two positions. As I mentioned in my April newsletter, there is a gap of over twenty years between the time when I began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing in the early 2000s and its publication date this July.

During the bookshop Q&A, I asked Nishi what it was like to be on tour promoting a book that she wrote so many years earlier. In the engagingly relaxed speaking style evident throughout her talk, she replied that it was a bit like having someone read your personal diary from that time – which was maybe not the most reassuring answer for me, but certainly made us all laugh!

Relaxing with my copy of Sakura by Kanako Nishi (translated by Allison Markin Powell)

In the weeks since that book event, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Nishi’s words. Although I can’t yet summarise the experience of discussing my novel in public, I can say something about how strange it has sometimes felt to be working in private on a long abandoned manuscript that I began when I was young.

When, to my utter astonishment, an editor who’d read A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing some years ago suddenly got back in touch with my literary agent and offered to take it on, I realised that I’d better quickly reread the book to see exactly what was there.

Given that I hadn’t looked at its pages in almost a decade, it was with some trepidation that I opened up the document on my computer.

I worried that the story wouldn’t hold together; that sentences originally penned when I was a less experienced writer might amount to something that was, well … just, quite bad; and that the book’s once contemporary, early 2000s setting might come across as dated.

Once I began reading, however, I felt pleasantly surprised. Despite seeing at once that plenty of work was needed – and the manuscript would, indeed, undergo at least five more significant redrafts – I was relieved to find that the essence of the story could remain as it was. As for the writing, I’d be lying if I denied that there were lines that made me cringe, instances of clunky phrases, metaphors that seemed muddled. But thankfully, my prior experience of publishing two other (nonfiction) books had taught me that problems such as these were fixable.

What then of the question of how much the novel had dated?

Beginning to read it again in early 2024, with a publishing deal on the table at last, I found that, yes, in some ways, the two-decade gap in time seemed vast. It was immediately apparent in everything from the colloquial language of the book’s characters, to the technology they used, to the extent to which their day-to-day lives were lived largely offline.

But as I made my way through the manuscript I realised that, in setting my novel in the early aughts I had inadvertently captured something of an era that was on the cusp of huge social change. As my characters moved through the book’s Osaka cityscape –  taking blurry images on their first camera phones, listening to music on CDs, making decisions about where to go out at night based on enticements promised by paper flyers – they had no idea how soon the prevalence of social media, smartphones and the internet in their pockets would completely alter the way they lived.

Rather than trying to work around these things, to try to make A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing seem more up-to-date, I decided that what I should do instead was to lean into these aspects of my novel. And as it would turn out, revisiting this recent-yet-distant past would become one of the most enjoyable aspects of redrafting. While perhaps not exactly like reopening the pages of an old diary, the process brought back enough memories of the early 2000s that, sitting at my desk in the months leading up to publication, it would often feel to me – and thrillingly so – as if I were living in two eras at once.

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 (where I’ll be in conversation with the author of Old Soul, Susan Barker) are available here.

Tickets for my Collected event in Durham are available here.

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.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – available for preorder!

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 6 Comments

After a long hiatus, I’m so happy to be able to be able to announce that I have a new book coming out this year!

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – my debut novel – will be published by Manilla Press in July 2026.

Set in the Japanese city of Osaka in the early 2000s, it is the story of Anna, who teaches English to bored students by day; and Loll, who passes her nights working in the smoky atmosphere of the Moonglow hostess bar, where she pours men’s drinks, lights their cigarettes and laughs playfully at their jokes. Unlike Anna, who has come to Japan to learn more about her Japanese heritage, Loll seems to have no clear reason for being there and no easily discernible past. And so when she suddenly disappears, there are only the barest clues as to where she might have gone. But, desperate to find her friend, Anna refuses to give up. Soon she is thrown onto a trail that will take her into the darkest corners of the neon-choked metropolis – hidden, forbidden places from which those who know the city best warn her to stay away.

To readers of A Secret Sisterhood and Out of the Shadows, this may seem like something of a departure from my last two published works, which were both historical group biographies.

However, my novel doesn’t really feel like a departure to me. This is, in part, because I began work on it many years ago, meaning that its development overlapped with the period when I was researching and planning A Secret Sisterhood (coauthored with Emma Claire Sweeney). It’s also because, having already published my two nonfiction books by the time I began revising the novel ahead of this year’s release, the lessons I’d learned from those experiences fed into the way I approached redrafting the novel. Finally, being able to view all three complete texts now, I can see links between these books – shared concerns; repeated motifs – that were not apparent to me before.

I first began sketching out A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing well over two decades ago, when I was in my early twenties and living in Japan. I am in my mid-forties now (and living, for the time being, in the USA), which may give something of a sense of what a long and convoluted path this book has taken to publication!

While A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is a work of fiction, it was influenced indirectly by the two years I spent working in Japan as a high school English teacher; my experience growing up in a British-Japanese household; and the family stories my mother used to tell me.

I’ll be sharing more about all of these things in the near future, but for now I’ll just leave you with the news that until this Friday only (20 February 2026) Waterstones has a 25%-off offer on preorders for the hardback.

As you might know, preorders are enormously helpful to authors because they let publishers and booksellers know ahead of publication that there is already reader interest in a book. If you are thinking about purchasing a copy anyway, I’d be very grateful if you would consider preordering one from Waterstones.

  • The offer runs only from 07.00 on Tuesday 17 February until 23.59 on Friday 20 February (UK, GMT)
  • Customers will need to enter the code “FEB26” at the checkout to redeem the offer to receive 25% off the RRP.
  • The offer will be exclusively available on the Waterstones website and the Waterstones app.

Being able to say that  A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is going to be published, more than twenty years after I began it, still feels a bit unbelievable. For a long time, I had given up on the possibility of it ever seeing the light of day.

If you’d like to hear more about how the book was rescued from its metaphorical bottom drawer, its plot, main characters and inspirations – and you don’t already receive emails from this site to your inbox –  please use the sign-up box on my homepage to get yourself on my mailing list.

This has all been a long time coming. I really look forward to sharing more about the twists and turns of this novel’s unlikely journey with you.