In 2007, a 13-year-old Japanese boy named Higashida Naoki — with the help of the alphabet board his mother created to help her son communicate his thoughts — built a desperately needed bridge between a nonspeaking autistic mind and the neurotypical world that has long struggled to understand them and too often neglected to try.
The bridge assumed the form of a book titled “The Reason I Jump,” and, like all bridges, it called attention to the gaps that it was hoping to cross: The gap between what Higashida thinks and what he’s able to convey; the gap between a nonspeaking autistic child and their parents; the gap between reductive misconceptions about the autism spectrum and the infinite constellation of human experience that such a spectrum actually represents.Higashida was part author and part codebreaker, which helps to explain why he and his book attracted the attention of “Cloud Atlas” writer David Mitchell.
Read full article