Agent
Assistant
Biography
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. Her debut novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing, will be published by Manilla Press in July 2026.
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
‘A page-turning novel that vividly evokes a dark side of Japan while exploring the uncertainties of youth. I couldn’t put it down.’ Annabel Abbs, author of The Language of Food
‘Emily Midorikawa excels in the sensual precision of her depiction of multi-faceted Osaka and in the sureness of her grip on the multiplying mysteries at the heart of this compelling, suspenseful first novel.’ Andrew Cowan, author of Your Fault
‘I absolutely loved it! I haven’t felt so immersed in a novel for a long while. Emily Midorikawa’s writing is so atmospheric… At once a pacy thriller and an elegantly written tale of family and connection.’ Sonia Velton
A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing (Manilla Press, 2026)
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.
Publications
Selected Publications
Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and most important, influence as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead. The Fox sisters inspired some of the era’s best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. While in the throes of a trance, Emma Hardinge Britten delivered powerful speeches to crowds of thousands. Victoria Woodhull claimed guidance from the spirit world as she took on the millionaires of Wall Street before becoming America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon narrowly escaped the asylum before becoming a celebrity campaigner against archaic lunacy laws. Drawing on diaries, letters, and rarely seen memoirs and texts, Emily Midorikawa illuminates a radical history of female influence that has been confined to the dark until now.
In their first book together, Midorikawa and Sweeney resurrect four literary collaborations, which were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows.
Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, and new documents uncovered during the authors’ research, the creative connections explored here reveal: Jane Austen’s bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp; how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor; the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.
A Secret Sisterhood uncovers the hidden literary friendships of the world’s most respected female authors.
