Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

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Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The Inner

Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
2014-10-24 02:30:53

By Whitney Laemmli

The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of

a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

by Naoki Higashida

Translated by K.A. Yoshida and David Mitchell; Introduction by David

Mitchell

Random House, 2013. 176 pages.

Naoki Higashida wants you to understand why he loves asking the same
questions over and over: “Repeating these is great fun. It’s like a game of
catch with a ball. Unlike the words we’re ordered to say, repeating
questions we already know the answers to can be a pleasure—it’s playing
with sound and rhythm.” He wants you to appreciate why he sometimes
has trouble expressing himself: “it’s because the words coming out of my
mouth are the only ones I can access at the time. These words are either
available because I’m always using them or because they left a lasting
impression on me at some point in the past.” And wants you to know the

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reason he jumps: “When I’m jumping, it’s as if my feelings are going

upward to the sky. Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is
enough to make my heart quiver. When I’m jumping, I can feel my body
parts really well, too—my bounding legs and my clapping hands—and that
makes me feel so, so good.”

Higashida is a Japanese teenager with autism, and his book, The Reason
I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, has
recently captivated the attention of both academic and popular audiences.
Published in 2007 in Japan, it was translated into English in 2013. Since,
The Reason I Jump has become A New York Times bestseller, been
featured on The Daily Show, and named among the best books of the year
by, among others, NPR and The Wall Street Journal. At the time of its
writing, Higashida was almost entirely nonverbal; he composed the text by
spelling out words with the aid of a printed table of forty basic Japanese
characters.

This intensive labor alone makes the text a remarkable achievement, but
The Reason I Jump is more than just an object of curiosity. The majority of
the book consists of very short chapters conceived as responses to
questions like “Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly?,”
“Do you prefer to be on your own?,” and “When you look at something,
what do you see first?” In bright and unselfconscious prose, Higashida
answers, explaining, for example, that some autistic people flap their
fingers in front of their faces because “light that reaches us like this feels
soft and gentle, like moonlight. But ‘unfiltered’ direct light sort of
‘needles’ its way into the eyeballs of people with autism in sharp straight
lines, so we see too many points of light. This actually makes our eyes
hurt.” In other chapters, Higashida notes that—contrary to popular
belief—he does not really like to be alone, that visual schedules provoke
intense anxiety, and that “whenever anyone treats me as if I’m still a
toddler, it really hacks me off.” Interspersed with these explanatory
chapters are short stories and illustrations, the former by Higashida, the
latter by artists Kai and Sunny.

Higashida’s memoir is not the only first-person account of the life of an

autistic individual. Temple Grandin, the livestock expert and professor of
animal science at Colorado State University, is perhaps the condition’s
most famous spokesperson and has lectured and written prolifically about
her experiences. Other relatively well known texts include John Elder
Robinson’s Asperger’s memoir Look Me in the Eye, and less heralded
works also abound: Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, Ido Kedar’s Ido
in Autism Land, Judy and Sean Barron’s There’s a Boy in Here, and Arthur
and Carly Fleischmann’s Carly’s Voice, to name just a few. The Reason I
Jump, however, is unique because of its author’s age, its straightforward
approach, and the unusual attention it has garnered.

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Higashida has a clear and compelling voice, and the book itself is
beautifully produced. Striking black-and-white images of birds, leaves, and
plants run throughout the text and adorn its cover. In a brief afterword,
illustrators Kai and Sunny write that they were inspired by Higashida’s
discussion of his exceptionally intimate relationship with nature. The two
have received numerous design awards and have collaborated with such
luminaries as Alexander McQueen; the aesthetic sensibility they bring to
the physical form of The Reason I Jump has likely helped attract readers
from beyond the usual audiences for works about disability.

It is also undeniable that—at least in the United States and Britain—the

Reason I Jump owes some of its popularity to its introduction, penned by
renowned British novelist David Mitchell. Best known for his 2004 novel,
Cloud Atlas, Mitchell is the author of six books in total, including Black
Swan Green and, most recently, The Bone Clocks. He is also the parent of
an autistic son. In his introduction, Mitchell describes his own reaction to
reading Higashida’s book in Japanese, recalling that “it felt, as if for the
first time, our own son was talking to us about what was happening inside
his head, through Naoki’s words.” Along with his wife, KA Yoshida,
Mitchell translated the text for the English-speaking market, eager to help
demonstrate that “locked inside the helpless-seeming autistic body is a
mind as curious, subtle and complex as yours, as mine, as anyone’s.”
None of this is to suggest that Higashida’s text is unworthy of the
attention it has received, but rather to think through the conditions that
allowed it to make inroads with an unusually broad readership. Works on
disability often suffer from a lack investment from publishers, who tend to
assume they have a dependable but narrow audience in the parents,
families, and teachers of disabled individuals. Mitchell’s involvement
brings cultural cachet, signaling that the subject might—and, in fact,
does—merit broader interest.

Still, it is also important to remember that The Reason I Jump is not an

academic text. Those hoping to find a thirteen year-old engaging in an
explicit discussion of society’s rampant ableism or the social construction
of disability will be disappointed.[1] Scholars will also almost certainly take
issue with Higashida’s occasional tendency to overgeneralize and his
suggestions that autism represents a kind of atavism, that “we are a
different kind of human, born with primeval senses,” redolent as it is with
eugenic overtones. Still, as Mitchell reminds us in the introduction, “the
author is not a guru,” he’s a kid, and Higashida’s most significant
academic contribution may be the very act of writing itself.

The burgeoning field of disability studies has made one of its aims the
representation of more diverse somatic, intellectual, and emotional
experiences. Disabled voices of all sorts, scholars argue, have been too
long absent from the critical discourse, stymieing deep discussion of

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disabled concerns and supporting the maintenance of misconceptions,

structural barriers, and outright discrimination. As a result of both activist
and scholarly efforts, however, change has begun to occur. Particularly in
the past fifteen years, academic audiences have witnessed a profusion of
historical and theoretical texts on disability, a substantial percentage of
which have been authored by disabled individuals. Conferences within
disability studies have also made concerted efforts to make themselves
accessible to those with varied needs, offering ASL interpreters, rest and
wellness rooms, and detailed guidelines that urge presenters to include
textual and audio descriptions of all visual materials, use jargon-free
language, provide large-print textual versions of spoken papers, and
refrain from the use of scented products. Some conferences also feature
presentations that do not hew to the standard academic format,
incorporating theater, dance, documentary film, and other multi-sensory
artistic products.

The Reason I Jump is yet another step in the direction of increased

representation. Even though, in Mitchell’s words, writing for Higashida is
“as taxing as, say, the act of carrying water in cupped palms across a
bustling Times Square or Piccadilly Circus would be to you or me,” with
the appropriate support, Higashida has managed to create an important,
textured testament to his experience of the world. On the other hand, The
Reason I Jump also suggests that we may have to go beyond
conventional forms of textual representation to convey the full spectrum of
human experience. Higashida’s explanatory prose is enlightening, but
the The Reason I Jump would be colossally impoverished without the
accompanying images and short stories—forms that, while perhaps less
immediately legible to some readers, may more directly express
Higashida’s world.

The book also—albeit implicitly—participates in scholarly efforts to

demonstrate how the study of disability might shed light on embodied
experience more broadly. Disability theorist Tobin Siebers, for example,
has argued that because the material and social world is constructed
around “normal” bodies, it is often difficult for non-disabled individuals to
step back and examine the system. Disability, he argues, forces one to
stand outside this framework, and thus disabled bodies make embodiment
visible—and therefore ripe for analysis—in new ways. In essence, one of the
reasons Higashida may be so successful in writing about his particular
way of being in the world is that he is constantly made aware of how it
differs from the majority of those who surround him.

Indeed, at its best, The Reason I Jump makes the reader consider his or
her own body in new ways. When he writes about his seemingly erratic
movements, Higashida explains that “both staying still and moving when
we’re told to is tricky — it’s as if we’re remote-controlling a faulty

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robot…You can’t always tell just by looking at people with autism, but we
never really feel that our bodies are our own…Stuck inside them, we’re
struggling so hard to make them do what we tell them.” Elsewhere, he
recalls the terrifying physical sensation of flashback memories and the
comforting gravitational pull produced by a walk outside. Readers of these
passages are made acutely aware of their own bodies, whether realizing
the relative ease with which they have moved through the world or finding
echoes of their own experience in Higashida’s.

As this small example illustrates, a move toward inclusive forms of

conversation and representation will not only give disabled individuals their
due, but also allow them to enhance and complicate other disciplines,
theories, and realms of practice. It is already well known that Temple
Grandin’s unique modes of sensory processing aided her in the design of
innovative, humane equipment for the livestock industry. Even David
Mitchell has spoken about the ways in which his boyhood stutter shaped
the writer he became. “It’s true,” he remarked in a 2010 Paris Review
interview, “that stammerers can become more adept at sentence
construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes
choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different
sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the
stammering rat.” As disability scholar Susan Wendell puts it, “Like living
with cerebral palsy or blindness, living with pain, fatigue, nausea,
unpredictable abilities, and/or the imminent threat of death creates
different ways of being that give valuable perspectives on life and the
world. Thus, although most of us want to avoid suffering if possible,
suffering is part of some valuable ways of being.”[2] Through Higashida’s
eyes, beauty, memory, nature, and the passage of time all look suddenly,
strikingly different, a contribution he makes both despite and because of
his clearly evident struggles.

Jason Taylor, the protagonist of Mitchell’s 2006 novel Black Swan Green,
is also a stammerer and also—like Naoki Higashida—a thirteen-year-old boy
trying to make his way through the morass of adolesence. Though mocked
at school and miserable at home, Jason finds comfort and control in
writing poetry, which he submits to the local parish newsletter. Always, but
perhaps especially at thirteen, writing is a way of crafting the self, and The
Reason I Jump reminds us that this outlet and others—art, music, even
academic conference papers—should be accessible to individuals with
varied abilities, needs, and gifts. These stories, though, need to be heard
as much as they need to be written, and readers of The Reason I
Jump will undoubtedly come away with a newly complicated sense of
Higashida’s world, a fuller appreciation of the power of writing, and a
more capacious understanding of the human experience.

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Whitney Laemmli is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and

Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently
completing her dissertation, “The Choreography of Everyday Life: Rudolf
Laban and the Analysis of Modern Movement,” which explores how a tool
for inscribing dance on paper developed in Weimar Germany found new
life in the psychiatric hospitals, anthropological practice, and corporate
boardrooms of mid-century America.

References

Baynton, Douglas. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in

American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives,
ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: NYU Press, 2001.

Cooter, Roger. “The Disabled Body,” in Companion to Medicine in the

Twentieth Century, edited by Roger Cooter and John Pickstone. London:
Routledge, 2000.

Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Kudlick, Catherine J. “Disability History: Why We Need Another

Other,” The American Historical Review 108 (June 2003): 763-93

Mitchell, David. “The Art of Fiction.” Interview in The Paris Review 193
(2010).

Mitchell, David. Black Swan Green. New York: Random House, 2007.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

2006.

Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as

Disabilities,” Hypatia 16 (2001): 17-33.

Wendell, Susan. “Who is Disabled? Defining Disability,” in The Rejected

Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York:
Routledge, 1996.

Notes

[1] Nevertheless, Higashida does express social constructionist ideas in a

more casual way, noting that he sees his autism not as an inherent

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problem, but as a mismatch between his particular brain architecture and

the world in which he lives. For an introduction to some of the key issues
in disability studies, see: Susan Wendell, “Who is Disabled? Defining
Disability,” in The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on
Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996); Douglas Baynton, “Disability and
the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability
History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky
(New York: NYU Press, 2001); Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why
We Need Another Other,” The American Historical Review 108 (June
2003): 763-93; Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2008); Roger Cooter, “The Disabled Body,” in
Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and
John Pickstone (London: Routledge, 2000).

[2] Wendell, “Unhealthy Disabled,” 31.

AMA citation
Laemmli W. Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a
Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism. Somatosphere. 2014. Available at:
http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/the-reason-i-jump.html. Accessed
October 23, 2014.

APA citation
Laemmli, Whitney. (2014). Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The
Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism. Retrieved October 23,
2014, from Somatosphere Web site:
http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/the-reason-i-jump.html

Chicago citation
Laemmli, Whitney. 2014. Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The
Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism. Somatosphere.
http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/the-reason-i-jump.html (accessed
October 23, 2014).

Harvard citation
Laemmli, W 2014, Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice
of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, Somatosphere. Retrieved October
23, 2014, from <http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/the-reason-i-jump.html>

MLA citation
Laemmli, Whitney. "Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump: The Inner
Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism." 24 Oct. 2014.
Somatosphere. Accessed 23 Oct.
2014.<http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/the-reason-i-jump.html>

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