Book of the week: The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy With Autism by Naoki Higashida

(Random House, $22)

That this memoir even exists is remarkable, said Amanda Mitchison in the Financial Times. The author, just 13 when he wrote it, lives with a form of autism so severe that he had to compose each sentence by pointing to letters on a cardboard alphabet chart. “As a reviewer, how can you possibly criticize a book spelled out letter by letter by a disabled child?” Fortunately, Higashida writes with “a lucid simplicity that is both child-like and lyrical.” The Reason I Jump, published six years ago in Japan and now translated by novelist David Mitchell and his wife, KA Yoshida, drives home “something we should all remember: In every autistic child, however cut off and distant they may outwardly seem, there resides a warm, beating heart.”

There have been autism memoirs before, but Higashida’s youth makes a crucial difference, said Noah Cruickshank in the A.V. Club. His adult predecessors had already devised ways to cope with the disorder. Higashida hadn’t, so his attempt to explain his experience, with chapters that answer questions like “Why do you line up your toy cars and blocks?” and “Do you prefer to be on your own?” powerfully evokes his sense of still-profound discomfort. At other times, he “rejoices in autistic ‘otherness,’” said Charlotte Moore in The Sunday Times (U.K.). He sees the disorder as giving him the ability to commune with nature, which, he writes, “wraps us up gently: glowing, swaying, bubbling, rustling.” His ideas are fascinating, and just as remarkable is that he “so profoundly understands the need to communicate them to others.”

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But we shouldn’t assume, as Higashida seems to, that he speaks for all people with autism, said Sallie Tisdale in The New York Times. Given that the disorder manifests itself in many different ways, how could he? In truth, The Reason I Jump “makes for odd reading.” Mitchell and Yoshida have a son with autism, and since the couple didn’t meet with the author while translating his thoughts, it’s impossible not to worry that their interpretation is colored by wishful thinking. Mitchell writes in an introduction that reading Higashida’s words “felt as if, for the first time, our own son was talking to us about what was happening inside his head.” That’s something we parents of autistic children yearn for. Still, “we have to be careful about turning what we find into what we want.”