Voicing the experience of Autism
Naoki Higashida’s book adds to the growing library of works written by those experiencing autism first hand
The library I feverishly built in the early days of my 18-year-old son’s autism diagnosis 14 years ago mostly comprised books by experts and parents. Though most yielded some kind of nugget of truth, I largely gave them up after I discovered there was a rich and growing body of personal literature by people on the spectrum: the brilliant Temple Grandin was followed by Daniel Tammet, Dawn Prince-Hughes, John Elder Robison and Toronto’s Carly Fleischmann, to name just a few.
It felt like the difference between reading a manual about deep-sea diving (or mountain-climbing, depending on your metaphoric preference) written by someone who’d observed it from a glassbottom boat and someone who’d not only done it, but could breathe down there. Though it’s often said that if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism — meaning that their differences can often seem greater than their similarities — I found that these accounts not only shed unique light on my son’s behaviour, they made me more empathic to it.
Another addition to the corpus, Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, made its way to these shores thanks to the efforts of Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell and his wife, KA Yoshida, who stumbled upon it in its original Japanese when they were looking for guidance about their autistic son. Their subsequent translation of it proved massively successful; Higashida has since become the most widely translated living Japanese author after Haruki Murakami.
It’s not just Higashida’s prodigious output — he’s written more than 20 books to date — that makes him exceptional. Unlike the previous authors, he remains, at 24, mostly non-verbal. His thoughtful, syntactically complex writing puts the lie to the already dubious characterization of such individuals as “low-functioning.” Higashida’s books reveal an astonishingly sophisticated and rich inner and, increasingly, outer life: he employs devices such as simile and metaphor, writes poetry and, as of this new book, Fall Down 7
Times Get Up 8, at least one strangely compelling short story.
Success, alas, has its pitfalls. In his introduction, Mitchell talks about Jump’s hostile reception from those who believed Higashida was either misdiagnosed or a fraud. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Sally Tisdale suggested that Mitchell might, as the hopeful father of a non-verbal autistic child, have unconsciously embellished his translation. A prominent medical writer thought Higashida’s occasional clichés sounded a lot like those of a parent of a child with ASD.
Lack of clarity about how Higashida uses an alphabet board to write contributed to the air of suspicion. The practice of “facilitated communication” — where a helper guides the hand of the autistic person over a keyboard — is considered highly controversial. Mitchell has thus taken pains to clarify that Higashida’s writing is transcribed, but not physically assisted.
That Higashida spends the first and last chapters expressing his gratitude and love for his mother won’t dispel the notion that she has a hand in his writing. Harder for conspiracy theorists to deny is the obvious evolution of his voice. Written between the ages of 18 and 22, Fall
Down replaces Jump’s question-and-answer style with more straightforwardly essayistic entries reflective of the blog posts they began life as.
Higashida still uses his genteel prose to explain how he processes the world — his anatomy of a meltdown should be compulsory reading for all parents of kids on the spectrum (or even off it, for that matter).
Ditto for his frequent pleas that caregivers exercise calm and avoid reprimanding for behaviour that’s already the source of enormous pain for its enactors.
But he also expresses a growing desire for independence, to play a meaningful role in society. When he talks about autistic rights over privileges and the necessity for the neurotypical population to embrace the neuro-atypical one, he echoes the language of a burgeoning global movement.
The book’s greatest interest is often in its details. Higashida favourably compares attitudes to his disability in America, where he travelled to promote his book, versus Japan. More hearteningly, he seems to have come to a greater acceptance of himself: “I might have longed once to become that neurotypical version of myself, but really it was only in the way a child would want to be the hero in a film . . . This world is my world. There is no other.”
It’s not just Naoki Higashida’s prodigious output — he’s written more than 20 books to date — that makes him exceptional. Unlike many authors, he remains, at 24, mostly non-verbal