Arts

A few years ago, I noticed on social media that my friend, Iain Maloney, had developed an obsession with lighthouses. Every now and again, here he was stood in front of another old lighthouse on some windswept outcrop of the Japanese coastline: in Ehime, in Izu, in Nagasaki. What the hell was going on? Iain is a man of the arts. He is a critically-acclaimed author – some of you may have read his excellent The Only Gaijin in the Village – and he writes poetry. He is the guitarist in Red Flag Waltz, a grungey, post-punky band that includes Fugazi covers in their set. He is cool. This was not the sort of guy you would imagine harboring a deep-seated passion for the architecture of something as mundane and functional as lighthouses. There must be something deeper here. There must be a story. With Iain, there usually is. Dark days It all started back in 2017, as Iain toured around Tōhoku in Japan’s northeast. It is an area of staggering natural beauty, but to the wider world it is best known for one thing: Fukushima. Like many foreigners who were living in Japan during the 2011 tsunami that took…