Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump is a memoir that offers readers a glimpse into a mind of a boy with autism (he was 13 years old when the book was published). David Mitchell and his wife, K.A. Yoshida, who have an autistic son, found the book so enlightening that they recently translated it from Japanese. Mitchell describes what he’s learned:
Living in close contact with autism, you do come to understand that autism is indeed a spectrum inhabited by all of us. The majority of us are on the ‘right’ side of a blurry zone on this spectrum where you don’t get diagnosed and don’t need to, but I’ve often thought about kids I was at school with in the benighted 1980s (which were in turn a cakewalk compared to the 1950s, when you shudder to think) who struggled with autism or Asperger’s before the word and diagnosis existed. Same thing with people I’ve met between then and now whom I dismissed as weird-in-a-bad way or selfish or as anal jobsworths or incommunicative beyond the point of rudeness, and now I think, You too, huh? Sorry I didn’t understand at the time.
Like a speech disfluency—I stammer—autism isn’t a disease but an architectural/electronic feature of your brain. The nature of this feature is still a mystery to science and the bad news is, there’s no cure—at best, there are treatments that make autism more liveable-with. The good news is that the brain is a mystery and its potential for plasticity, and for evolving new pathways, has been consistently underrated. Ask recoverers from strokes. I’m not saying you should live in hope for a miraculous cure—I don’t believe in ’em, especially if there’s a trademark or copyright symbol in the neighbourhood—but I am saying you should never underestimate an autistic person’s talent for discovering a key to a lock you never expected to see being opened, from the inside.
The Dish 