Naoki Higashida wrote The Reason I Jump as a 13-year-old boy. Now, he shares his thoughts and experiences as a 24-year old young man with severe autism. In short chapters, he explores education, identity, family, society and personal growth. He also allows readers to experience profound moments we take for granted, like the thought-steps necessary for him to register that it's raining outside. Introduced by author David Mitchell (co-translator with his wife, KA Yoshida), this book is part memoir/part critique of a world that sees disabilities ahead of disabled people. It is a self-portrait-in-progress of a young man who happens to have autism and who wants to help us understand it better.

Written by a thirteen-year-old boy with autism, this memoir demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine. Using an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct words, sentences, and thoughts that he is unable to speak out loud, Naoki answers even the most delicate questions that people want to know. Parents and family members who never thought they could get inside the head of their autistic loved one at last have a way to break through to the curious, subtle, and complex life within. Naoki shares his unique point of view on not only autism but life itself. His insights, into the mystery of words, the wonders of laughter, and the elusiveness of memory, are so startling, so strange, and so powerful that you will never look at the world the same way again. In his introduction, novelist David Mitchell writes that Naoki's words allowed him to feel, for the first time, as if his own autistic child was explaining what was happening in his