My interest in William Adams springs from my fascination with seventeenth-century Japanese culture, which began in my student days. This is combined with a desire to recontextualize his story from a Japanese point of view –something that hitherto has been missing from Western literature. Adams, after all, became a fully integrated member of the upper echelons of Japanese society [it has not happened again since] and it was this phenomenon with all its cultural implications that triggered my curiosity to find out more. I might add that as a ‘gaijin ’ (foreigner) in British society for the last twenty-five years, I have at times felt that I have shared some of Adams’ emotions, as he endeavoured to bridge the cultural divide and manage the pain, the presumptions and the paradoxes surrounding him as a foreigner.

My book is an attempt to combine fact and fiction. It is a dangerous route for any author, but yet one that does have honourable precedents, particularly where the ‘fiction’ is based on the most likely scenarios and, in this case, informed by a native knowledge of culture and context. There will be those who dismiss such an approach as poor or even lazy scholarship. However, I hope there will be others, looking for colour and atmosphere, who will accept my invitation to ride these two horses with me in a spirit of adventure and open-mindedness.

Accepting my responsibility for transparency over this ‘twohorse’ approach, as far as possible, I have annotated my sources and where this is not the case the reader will understand that I have imagined the dialogue and the context. Where informed imagining expands on a known event to create a likely scenario, the narrative will slip into the present tense, as in the Prologue.

I have of course read the already extensive literature in English on William Adams, from P.G. Rogers’ The First Englishman in Japan [1956] to Giles Milton's Samurai William [2002]. I studied Adams’ original logbook and letters, the diary of Richard Cocks [leader of the English East India Company in Japan, 1613–1623], the famous logbook by Richard Hakluyt, the journal of Captain Saris’ voyage to Japan and many other European sources which I refer to elsewhere.