Emily Midorikawa
Author
Photograph: Rosalind Hobley
Books
Books
Emily Midorikawa is author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, and the joint author of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Her journalism has appeared in publications including TIME, The Times and the Washington Post. She teaches on the writing programme at New York University London.
A TINY SPECK OF BLACK AND THEN NOTHING (Manilla Press)
A dazzling literary suspense novel that plunges readers into the nightlife of Ōsaka, where a young hostess's disappearance initiates a dangerous pursuit through the city's criminal underworld
Anna has never met anyone like the enigmatic Loll: a British hostess at the Moonglow bar, in the Japanese city of Ōsaka. While Anna teaches bored students by day, Loll passes the nights in smoky, dim-lit rooms where she pours men’s drinks, lights their cigarettes and laughs playfully at their jokes.
With her blonde wigs, shimmering dresses and bejewelled nails, Loll cuts a mesmerising figure. But her skin bears unexplained bruises beneath its glittering facade, and Anna’s concern slowly begins to grow. She is troubled by the secret of the carved jade stone necklace that her glamorous new friend seems determined to protect; the mysterious identity of Loll’s best client with shadowy links to the city’s underworld crime bosses; and the sight Anna witnesses one afternoon: Loll teetering alone on the edge of a railway track, caught in the deafening rush as a train hurtles by.
Unlike Anna who has come to Ōsaka to learn more about her half-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 of 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.
Praise for A TINY SPECK OF BLACK AND THEN NOTHING
'A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is the exquisitely-written and utterly compelling tale of a young English teacher abroad in Japan, and her struggle to find answers when her friend, a Western nightclub hostess, disappears. Set partly in the exhilarating neon-lit world of Ōsaka’s clubs and bars, Midorikawa’s novel captures the intoxication of new friendship, as well as the frightening unknowability of those we are closest to – including the protagonist’s Japanese mother, who vanished when she was a child. Interwoven with folklore and insights into contemporary Japan, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is a gripping and twisty literary thriller, with a cast of fascinating, enigmatic characters, and great emotional resonance and depth.' Susan Baker, author of The Incarnations
'Characters so real they seem like old friends. Settings so striking they take on the quality of memories. An elegant, edgy and cinematic portrait of womanhood in all its vulnerability and strength. A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is a captivating novel that explores what it means to disappear without trace and asks what it takes to leave one’s mark.' Emma Claire Sweeney, author of Owl Song at Dawn
