The news hit me hard. Was it true? Had he been that bad?

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Then I started to blame myself. Why had I been so lazy? Why hadn't I tried harder?

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Lewis "Buddy" Nordan was no more. Buddy was gone. He passed away. And it was more than ten days after his demise that I heard the news.

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It was 1989 when I first discovered Lewis Nordan as his second collection The All-Girl Football Team was reprinted by Gary Fisketjon's Vintage Contemporaries. It was still in the final days of the cyberpunk movement and I'd been talking a lot with Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. But in that particular year, Bruce coined the term Slipstream to describe crossover genre- bending fiction. And Lew really loved Gary's work at Vintage, as I loved Barry Hannah and Thomas McGuane in that imprint, too. We were all looking for a new direction and something interesting. So I took that title and was immediately delighted to find it was a reprint of an LSU Press edition of 1986. Great. LSU was the first James Lee Burke publisher. I trusted its editorial taste. And it was a southern fiction collection which I loved so much. But when I read the first story, "Sugar Among the Chickens," I was really hooked. It was a magic realist story, or rather in the vein of Italo Calvino-esque fantastic literature. It knocked me out and soon I bought his other collection, too. All stories were set in a mythical Mississippi small town called Arrow Catcher, and they were filled with surrealistic wildlife and very human, sad and odd people. And love and humor. Music. Gary had already moved to another publisher, so I wasn't sure if it was a Fisketjon title or not. But definitely those collections were masterpieces, far superior to other Vintage collections like those by Ray Carver.

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Then things changed. Many fine old publishing houses had been bought and merged into the big ones, and literary fiction imprints were now urged to be profitable and began to be divided into classic and youth-oriented urban lines like Gary's. Lewis Nordan's fiction was exiled from New York biggies. And then a small new independent publisher stepped forward from the south. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in North Carolina started to publish Nordan titles. Those were great. And novels, to boot! Believe me, it was the 90s and things were terrible. Everybody talked about nothing but money. While Japan suffered from recession, the U.S. and Europe felt victorious over the fall of Soviet Empire. Capitalists won and toddled up to the top of the world. There should be no magic in the American South, 'cause it wasn't a third world anymore. It was the New South then. Yet we could have the fantastic jewels of Buddy's novels! How lucky we were!

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While Buddy produced wonderful novels throughout the 90s, though, nobody cared. I tried to persuade publishers in Japan to let me translate his work, but to no avail. No one was interested in short story collections except urban minimalist fiction. Everybody was looking for a new trend after cyberpunk and minimalism, so one-and-only types of storytellers like Buddy had no chance. Besides, southern fiction had a long history of commercial failures in Japan. Even Huck Finn was considered a minor work commercially. To Kill a Mocking Bird was never popular, along with its film adaptation. Most of the editors I talked to sadly shook their heads when they heard that Lewis was from the American South, especially the Mississippi delta.

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But I loved his novels so much I finally decided to visit him. My career so far was heavily based on the SF/F genre and I had no connection to the authors of literary fiction. So I visited first to his publisher, Algonquin. It was in the fall of 2001, immediately after 9/11, but for me it was just after the publication of his fictional memoir the previous year. Because I didn't drive, and public transportation after the terror incident was a bit troublesome, it wasn't very easy for me to reach the publishing house. Yet, as I finally found the small housing complex where Algonquin resided, I found it to be beautiful. It looked like an ideal office for a small independent publisher, cozy, quiet, far from urban noise and rush, and surrounded by trees.

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Shannon Ravenel, his editor, welcomed me heartily but told me the sad news that Buddy couldn't write any more. He suffered from neuropathy and while talking and reading was no problem, he simply could not write. She urged me instead to call him on the phone. I tried twice during my travel, but I had no luck. It was either busy or no one was there at that particular time. Then I gave up and just sent him a mail, expressing my love for his works. He immediately answered me, saying "Thank you." But that was the only correspondence I had with him. Although I counted him as one of the top five ever authors in the world, I never tried any further. Just because I couldn't find any words to say to him, dwelling on my sadness. The words, "He can't write anymore," were ringing endlessly in my brain.

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Then he published a story in Oxford American in 2003. It was a good story but I found no shimmering image nor soaring music in it like he used to show. I realized then how it was hard for him to write. He still might have wonderful things up his sleeves, but he had lost his magic wand. Whenever an editor came to ask me for my recommendation, I always added his collections after a long line of new authors, saying he was my single favorite author. But that was the only effort I made in those days.

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After I received the saddest news in April, I tried to do some research and found that Buddy was still writing. Even his fans and friends gathered in 2009 to celebrate his works and then wrote a book from that event, Buddy-Fest. Every reader of his fiction loved him so much and expressed his or her joy of reading it.

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I decided to make amends. I still had one final chance to have his work travel to Japan. I would now hold a big memorial service to him on my website. It was no use to dwell on self pity and shame.

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Now Buddy, I do my best to welcome you here. Before I bid you a final goodbye, I'll express all my love to you and your work, and let all the world know that you have your readers everywhere, even in the far east of Japan. It'll be a two-months long feast of joy, of having Buddy and his wonderful fiction in our time. So now I say, Welcome.