Higashida’s title was meant to be taken at face value (he has physical reactions to emotional feelings, and literally wanted people to understand why he sometimes leaps off his feet), but the global popularity of the book revealed “The Reason I Jump” to have a double meaning: By explaining why he jumped up, Higashida had also mapped out many of the things that neurodivergent people and their parents have been dying to jump over. Together, they translated “The Reason I Jump” into English - effectively bridging yet another crucial gap, albeit not without some controversy - and the book became an international bestseller that has since been published in over 30 different languages. Not only do Mitchell’s novels reflect a near-pathological obsession with puzzle-solving and the space-time between people, but he and his wife KA have an autistic child of their own. 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. 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. 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 reason i jump pages