Land of the rising Scot

WORKING on my new novel, The Pure Land has been an amazing experience - exhausting but ultimately exhilarating. The actual writing of the book took little over six months. (For me that's a marathon done at the speed of a full-out sprint!) But my grappling with the subject matter goes back nine years. It was a story that quite simply wouldn't leave me alone.

Folk often ask writers where they get their ideas. This particular one came to me when I took up the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Aberdeen, a decade ago. I fancied writing a stage play with some kind of Aberdeen subject matter, and I was drawn to the story of Thomas Blake Glover, a famous (or infamous!) product of the north-east.

Glover was born in Fraserburgh in 1838 and grew up in Aberdeen where his father was with the Coastguard. At the age of 19 he gained a posting to Shanghai, working as a shipping clerk for Jardine Mathieson, at the time one of the biggest trading companies in the East. At 20 he moved to Japan (posted to Nagasaki), which was reluctantly opening up to trade with the West - persuaded by American gunboats - after 200 years of isolation under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The prevailing atmosphere was hostile, resistant to change. The Japanese, understandably, had no wish to be colonised as India and China had been. Foreign traders lived under real threat from disaffected samurai. Japanese were not allowed to leave the country, on pain of summary execution. This was the world into which the 20-year-old Glover arrived, in search of adventure and wealth, knowing nothing of Japan, its language or its culture. Yet by the time he was 25 he was a millionaire, he was one of the most influential men in the country, and he had aligned himself with a rebel faction, a group of young samurai intent on overthrowing the Shogun and modernising Japan.

Initially he made his fortune by legitimate trading, in silk and tea, in opium, which was big business for Jardine's. Then he dealt in arms, at first with the cavalier attitude of selling to the highest bidder, but increasingly taking sides in what was effectively a civil war, arming the rebel samurai. He smuggled a number of these young men out to the West, at great risk to them but also to himself. He had battleships built in the Hall Russell yard in Aberdeen and shipped out to Nagasaki. In later years he called himself "the greatest rebel".

By the time he was 30, the rebel faction had been successful, and Glover had come so far from just "making a fast buck" that he bankrupted himself in support of the revolution. The samurai he had helped formed the new government, restoring the Emperor Meiji as a figurehead and propelling Japan into the forefront of modern, industrialised nations. Without Glover this would quite simply not have happened, or at least it would not have happened so quickly. He helped establish a new trading company - Mitsubishi - and lived in Japan till his death in 1911.

He was a huge, charismatic larger-than-life character. It's a fantastic ripping yarn of a story, an absolute gift to a writer, especially when the political intrigue is interwoven (as it was) with a number of love stories. One of these - a relationship with a courtesan called Maki Kaga who bore him a son - was certainly a strand in the story of Madame Butterfly. One commentator said, "It's a story Bernardo Bertolucci would pay good money for!"

It was also a story I felt I could tell in my own way - my own love affair with Japan goes back to my childhood and I've been consciously influenced by its culture since my teens. I'd also written 'historical' drama before, from radio series on William Wallace and the Jacobites to a stage play on the Timex dispute in Dundee and a reworking of David Lindsay's Thrie Estaites. But before I could get too far with my stage version of the Glover story, that Bertolucci factor kicked in. My attention was drawn to an article in the local Aberdeen press saying a young would-be director - Richard Scott Thomson - was planning a film version of Glover's life. Also involved was Alex McKay, author of the only biography of Glover, Scottish Samurai, from which I had gleaned most of my information. I contacted Richard, and Alex, and offered my services to write the screenplay. With Alex as archivist and researcher, we launched into the project.

I made a trip to Nagasaki, visited Glover's house, preserved as a museum and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The house, with others in the western settlement, was on the right side of the hill to survive the blast of the atomic bomb in 1945. It's something of a theme park, with a statue of Madame Butterfly and son, moving walkways through the gardens, and piped Puccini. Nobody does kitsch quite like the Japanese.

A statue of Glover, craggy, carved from solid rock, looks out over the gardens; beyond it an open vista across the bay to the surrounding hills. It's the view young Glover would have taken in, now built up, miles of Mitsubishi shipyards lining the shore. It's a huge historical irony - one with which I begin and end the book - that the reason for the bombing of Nagasaki was to take out the Mitsubishi yards. So in a sense Glover set in motion the process that would result in the city being destroyed.

On my return, I started working on the screenplay which foundered, some years and several drafts later, stranded in development hell. The final nail in the coffin was the release of Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai - a truly awful film, but set in the same historical period, with the same background events.

I wrote the whole thing off to experience. My agent (the late Giles Gordon) and one or two other folk had suggested the material might work well as a novel, but the sinking of the film project had drained me of enthusiasm for the whole thing.

Time passed, as time does, and I thought I'd revisit Glover, salvage some of the work I'd done, shape the material into a novella which would fit into a collection I had it in mind to write. I quickly realised, however, that the Glover story wouldn't be contained and it had to be a full-length novel or nothing. I wrote the first three chapters, two or three publishers were very interested, and eventually Canongate made me an offer I really couldn't refuse.

In terms of historical accuracy, I was at pains to not to write anything that could not have happened, but the lack of first-hand documentation on Glover's life - no journals, few letters, fewer still contemporary accounts - gave me the freedom to invent him as I went along. Alex McKay continued to be endlessly and graciously generous with his research material, passing on photocopied documents, suggesting other books I might read. Responses to the novel suggest that the juggling act works. One researcher, looking into the Glover story for a project of his own, asked if I'd unearthed hitherto undiscovered material, so authoritative did the 'fiction' sound. But essentially I was after a deeper kind of truth, and I suspect what most novelists are looking for is a story that serves as a kind of metaphor, allowing us to explore those deeper truths.

At the heart of Glover's story is the relationship he had with Kaga, the mother of his son. This was a common pattern of events in those times, yet it was Glover's tale which inspired the Madame Butterfly story. In my screenplay version I never felt I had resolved Maki's story satisfactorily. It was something I knew I had to address in the novel, but I had no clear idea how I would handle it. Then, about halfway through the writing of Glover's ripping yarn, I had a sudden awakening, a moment of insight. I had it in mind to write a short contemporary scene, bringing things right up to date - 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. By a spooky coincidence when I finished writing this scene I happened to look at the time and date on my computer, and it was exactly the moment when the bomb had fallen 60 years earlier. I imagined a young modern Japanese woman - a feisty Harajuku girl - being unexpectedly moved by the statue of Butterfly - Cho Cho San - in the gardens at Glover's house. "What happened to her?" she asks. "The woman in the story." I made up my own answer to the question, one I hadn't answered in the screenplay. I took Maki on a spiritual journey, towards the Pure Land of the title, which in this context represents the Buddhist paradise, or the goal of meditation.

The last 100 pages of the book effectively became her untold story, and all I can say is it felt given. The writing came from somewhere deep, flowed with an ease and a certainty, a confidence in taking the story somewhere else. In one of those chills-down-the-spine moments, after I'd finished the book, I read that the pattern of Maki's life, from courtesan to spiritual seeker, was not uncommon, and that one particularly fine woman poet - whose work I'd had Maki read - had made a similar journey.

I knew once I'd written that ending that the book was going to work, that this was where it had to go, and that Maki's story threw an altogether different light back on the main drive of the narrative, the essentially male world of adventuring and political intrigue. In the great sweep of historical events, empires, civilisations, rise and fall, come and go; the universe continues at its own sweet will. I hope what this last scene represents is the ultimate triumph of acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, that these endure beyond all else.

• The Pure Land will be published by Canongate on August 24. Alan Spence will read from it at the Book Festival (0845 373 5888), Friday, 8.30pm