"Me Japanese Boy I Love You"

Laurie and I spent about six weeks in Japan in 2024, and not long after we returned to the US my English friend Martin Edwards invited me to contribute a story to an anthology he was putting together of crime fiction inspired by Burt Bacharach's songs.

I'm not really a big Bacharach fan, but I like Martin — and it's not every day an invitation to write for someone else's anthology comes along — so I Googled "Burt Bacharach songs" to see if anything jumped out at me as a possible inspiration ... and discovered to my delight an early lyric he wrote for Bobby Goldsboro called "Me Japanese Boy I Love You."

So, start with the fact that Martin's anthology was intended to raise money for autism charities, and I'd recently written a story from the point of view of a teenaged male autistic character for Dawn Barclay's Elton John anthology. Add to that a second fact: near the end of our time in Japan, Laurie and I attended a Tokyo Swallows baseball game. Put Burt Bacharach, autism, and Japanese baseball together, and wallah! The result was "Me Japanese Boy I Love You," in which an autistic fourteen-year-old American girl accompanying her mother on a business trip to Tokyo solves a dying-message murder at the Swallows stadium. (An old friend of mine from when I used to live in Cleveland has an autistic daughter, and I ran the story past both of them to ensure that I had the autism details right. With their permission, I named the girl in my story Terann, which is the name of my friend's daughter.)

What the World Needs Now: Mysteries Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach was published by Level Best in June 2026, and I hope it makes a ton of money for the UK and US autism charities Martin has selected as recipients for the royalties it generates. I hate to steer anyone to Bezos Enterprises, but as of this writing the only place where it seems possible to order it is via his mega store. I'm not going to put a link here, but the Google Machine will take you there ... and hopefully by the time you go looking it'll take you to bookshop.org or Barnes & Noble, instead....

(Parenthetical note: Although the Bacharach song is titled "Me Japanese Boy I Love You," Martin chose to shorten the title of my story to "Me Japanese Boy" for the purposes of his anthology. I suggested using the full title, but he felt that was "clunky" and decided to keep the shorter title. I'm not thrilled with that decision, but when I edit anthologies I expect "my" contributors to respect my editorial judgment, and turnabout is fair play, so I didn't make a fuss. Here on my website, though, I've chosen to list the story under what I consider to be its real title....)

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