The Path to Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight, by David Mitchell

Naoki Higashida is a young man who lives with his family in a small city outside Tokyo called Chiba. Like my own son, Naoki has non-verbal autism, and has never engaged in a spoken conversation longer than a handful of words in his life. His ID card classifies his autism as “severe” – and with good reason.

What Naoki can do, however, is texticate (a verb of my own invention, ahem...). A non-verbal texticator types his or her thoughts out on a computer keyboard or on an alphabet grid – a cardboard QWERTY keyboard with “Yes”, “No” and “Finished” tabs added. Naoki builds up sentences in Japanese by spelling words, letter by letter, and voicing what he types as he goes along.

He can also type directly onto a keyboard, though the dropdown menus used to convert the Roman alphabet to Japanese characters adds an extra layer of distraction.

The whole process requires Herculean effort, as Naoki’s attention is constantly hijacked by his autism, requiring him to start over, often multiple times in a single sentence. I’ve watched Naoki take 20 minutes to finish one line. I’ve never seen him give up, and it’s this persistence that allows him to fulfill his early dream of becoming a writer.

The first book of Naoki’s I read – The Reason I Jump – was published at the ripe old age of 13. My wife, who is also from Japan, found it online and took a punt on it. It was the most illuminating book either of us had read, in terms of helping us to understand our own son’s autism. When asked, “So how did it help, exactly?” my answers split into two.

First off, Naoki gives simple advice: keep talking, even if you’re getting nothing back; don’t respond to a meltdown with anger or distress, as it pours fuel on the fire; remember that a daily schedule can be a prison as well as a handrail.

Much of this was applicable to my son – though not all of it, because one person’s autism will never be exactly the same as another’s. Secondly, and maybe more importantly, Naoki’s writing reformed my attitudes about autism and my son’s potential.

Us neuro-typicals are such suckers for conflating a communicative impairment with an intellectual one.

The gap between Naoki’s autistic exterior and his interior eloquence made me suspect that I’d been underestimating – badly – my son’s ability to think, feel emotion, imagine, analyse, aspire and love.

So I upped my expectations for what my son could do, tried to be more patient and pro-active, and credited him with more agency than I had done previously.

Autism isn’t very measurable, so all evidence tends to be anecdotal: but my wife and I both felt our son bloomed under the new conditions. Meltdowns grew rarer, the self-harming dropped away, and bit by bit our son began to use language. How do I know these improvements wouldn’t have happened anyway? I don’t.

But I do know that actions engender reactions, positive and negative, in relationships as well as physics. I know that I hate being patronised, or treated like an incompetent, or being discussed in my presence like I’m a coat-stand – so why would my son be any different?

And while we still had, have, and always will have challenging days, I know that our household became a less fraught one. I believe that some of these improvements, at least, stem from what Naoki Higashida taught me about autism.

My wife and I didn’t want to translate any of Naoki’s follow-up books to The Reason I Jump for the sake of it. Jump was already so articulate and so self-contained a portrait of autism in boyhood that we wanted to let a few years pass until Naoki had fresh perspectives to write from and new experiences to write about. So that’s we did; until Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight came along.

The book’s many short chapters were drawn from a blog Naoki wrote as an older teenager, supplemented in the English edition by a short story Naoki wrote specially, a tasty interview with the Japanese edition of The Big Issue magazine, a few poems, email correspondence with my wife and I, plus two or three chapters from an earlier book. Sequenced into the final form, Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight offers a portrait of autism in young adulthood – a kind of older brother to The Reason I Jump.

Naoki still sheds light on autism, debunks myths, offers advice, invites readers (and Radio 4 listeners, thanks to Allegra McIlroy who got the old band together again - with actor Matthew Beard reading) to consider both autism and their own minds and lives.

The new book also showcases Naoki’s development. Since Jump, the author has left boyhood, graduated from high school, travelled around Japan, visited New York, read more, written more, thought more and become both a kind of autism advocate – and a tax-payer.

His vocabulary has widened and his curiosity has deepened. Naoki Higashida’s writing and his progress are gifts of hope...

Listen to Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight – Radio 4’s Book of the Week.