Higashida Naoki - The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2007 by Naoki Higashida
Translation copyright 2013 by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell
Introduction copyright 2013 by David Mitchell
Illustrations copyright 2013 by Kai and Sunny

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Japan in 2007 by Escor Publishers Ltd.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Higashida, Naoki.
[Jiheisho no boku ga tobihaneru riyu. English]
The reason I jump / by Naoki Higashida; translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-8129-9487-2
1. Higashida, Naoki, 1992 2. Autistic peopleJapanBiography.
3. Autistic peoplePsychology. 4. Autism. I. Title.
RC553.A88H5313 2013
616.858820092dc23
[B] 2012045703

www.atrandom.com

Cover design and illustration: Kai and Sunny

v3.1

The thirteen-year-old author of this book invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that youre hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend. Id like to push the thought-experiment a little further. Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed, but now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how the editor allowed your mind to function for all these years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now youre on your own.

Now your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music. The radios have no off-switches or volume controls, the room youre in has no door or window, and relief will come only when youre too exhausted to stay awake. To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without noticeyour editor of the senses. Suddenly sensory input from your environment is flooding in too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. Colors and patterns swim and clamor for your attention. The fabric softener in your sweater smells as strong as air freshener fired up your nostrils. Your comfy jeans are now as scratchy as steel wool. Your vestibular and proprioceptive senses are also out of kilter, so the floor keeps tilting like a ferry in heavy seas, and youre no longer sure where your hands and feet are in relation to the rest of you. You can feel the plates of your skull, plus your facial muscles and your jaw; your head feels trapped inside a motorcycle helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the air conditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your fatherwhos right here in front of yousounds as if hes speaking to you from a cellphone, on a train going through lots of short tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. You are no longer able to comprehend your mother tongue, or any tongue: from now on, all languages will be foreign languages. Even your sense of time has gone, rendering you unable to distinguish between a minute and an hour, as if youve been entombed in an Emily Dickinson poem about eternity, or locked into a time-bending SF film. Poems and films, however, come to an end, whereas this is your new ongoing reality. Autism is a lifelong condition. But even the word autism makes no more sense to you now than the word or or .

Thanks for sticking to the end, though the real end, for most of us, would involve sedation and being forcibly hospitalized, and what happens next its better not to speculate. Yet for those people born onto the autistic spectrum, this unedited, unfiltered and scary-as-all-hell reality is home. The functions that genetics bestows on the rest of usthe editorsas a birthright, people with autism must spend their lives learning how to simulate. It is an intellectual and emotional task of Herculean, Sisyphean and Titanic proportions, and if the autistic people who undertake it arent heroes, then I dont know what heroism is, never mind that the heroes have no choice. Sentience itself is not so much a fact to be taken for granted, but a brick-by-brick, self-built construct requiring constant maintenance. As if this wasnt a tall enough order, people with autism must survive in an outside world where special needs is playground slang for retarded, where meltdowns and panic attacks are viewed as tantrums, where disability allowance claimants are assumed by many to be welfare scroungers, and where British foreign policy can be described as autistic by a French minister. (M. Lellouche apologized later, explaining that he never dreamed that the adjective could have caused offense. I dont doubt it.)

Autism is no cakewalk for the childs parents or carers either, and raising an autistic son or daughter is no job for the faintheartedin fact, faintheartedness is doomed by the first niggling doubt that theres Something Not Quite Right about your sixteen-month-old. On Diagnosis Day, a child psychologist hands down the verdict with a worn-smooth truism about your son still being the same little guy that he was before this life-redefining news was confirmed. Then you run the gauntlet of other peoples reactions: Its just so sad; What, so hes going to be like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man?; I hope youre not going to take this so-called diagnosis lying down!; and my favorite, Yes, well, I told my pediatrician where to go stick his MMR jabs. Your first contacts with most support agencies will put the last nails in the coffin of faintheartedness, and graft onto you a layer of scar tissue and cynicism as thick as rhino hide. There are gifted and resourceful people working in autism support, but with depressing regularity government policy appears to be about Band-Aids and fig leaves, and not about realizing the potential of children with special needs and helping them become long-term net contributors to society. The scant silver lining is that medical theory is no longer blaming your wife for causing the autism by being a Refrigerator Mother as it did not so long ago (Refrigerator Fathers were unavailable for comment) and that you dont live in a society where people with autism are believed to be witches or devils and get treated accordingly.

Where to turn to next? Books. (Youll have started already, because the first reaction of friends and family desperate to help is to send clippings, Web links and literature, however tangential to your own situation.) Special Needs publishing is a jungle. Many