ONE HAS TO commiserate a little with Alan Spence, as he brings out his carefully researched, wonderfully written and very moving “East meets West” epic of Japanese life between the 1850s and the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki, almost a century later.

There has been something of a fashion for romantic Japan over the past couple of years, the most recent manifestations being the ubiquitous Memoirs of a Geisha franchise and various Samurai flicks. The Pure Land is not part of this trend; rather, it stands proudly outside it, a work of real integrity and consummate art. When reading this book, we cannot help but feel that Spence has a subtle, yet oddly physical, appreciation of the culture and people he portrays, which will come as no surprise to readers of his poetry, where he marries a native Scot’s sense of the world with a playful and serious understanding of haiku.

The Pure Land is the story of an Aberdonian merchant’s career in Japan in the years following the opening of the country to foreign trade (a process in which Commodore Perry’s “black ships” played a significant part). Thomas Glover, a real-life figure known as the Scottish Samurai, is a forceful, ambitious man, keen to make the most of himself — and, in the public sphere at least, he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.

Glover’s private life is more painful, however: his last days in Aberdeen are overshadowed by a fascination with a prostitute he encounters during a drunken outing with friends, and his first night in Nagasaki is spent with a courtesan, in spite of being warned to avoid the local “tinkers and hoors”. It is a courtesan who bears him a child, Tomisaburo. All his dealings with the Japanese, even his love life, are coloured by commerce.

Glover’s adventures, and those of his lover and son, draw upon the kind of details we find in other works of this kind: samurai, pleasure districts, the Japanese landscape, seppuku, political machinations and betrayal, culminating in the fall of the old Shogunate system and the eventual destruction of Nagasaki by American bombers. All of this is told in lively and engaging way — it cannot be denied that The Pure Land is a page turner of the first order — but what sets this novel apart is its philosophical depth, a depth and texture that could have been achieved only by a writer steeped in Buddhist ideas.

After the Ladybird spirituality of the Sixties. any talk of “form and emptiness” can easily sound like hippy posturing but, in the right hands, it becomes a rich vein of thought and imagery.

Spence handles it superbly, contrasting the dour Presbyterian rhetoric of Glover’s early youth in East Scotland — “And the earth was without form and void” — with the complex Buddhist philosophy of Meiji Japan — perhaps best expressed in the Diamond Sutra, invoked in the novel’s opening pages, as Tomisaburo witnesses the destruction of Nagasaki: “He turned again to his copy of the Diamond Sutra, seeking guidance, light in the darkness, trying to understand. The verse read, Shiki soku ze ku. Form is Emptiness.”

Yet, though these ideas are explored in the thoughts and words of the novel’s protagonists, it is the way that they are enshrined in the novel’s imagery and structure — a structure that balances the seemingly opposite forces of form and emptiness, of creative void and annihilation — that marks The Pure Land out, not merely as an engaging and vivid historical novel, but also a meditative work of art that is as finely honed as a samurai’s sword.

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