Naoki Higashida

FALL DOWN 7 TIMES, GET UP 8

A young man's voice from the silence of autism

Translated by David Mitchell and K. A. Yoshida

288pp. Sceptre. 14.99 [pounds sterling].

978 1 4447 9908 8

Laura James

ODD GIRL OUT

An autistic woman in a neurotypical world

240pp. Bluebird Press. 16.99 [pounds sterling].

978 1 5098 4306 0

"My Dream Me is also a Fake Me", writes Naoki Higashida in Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8. He is describing dreams in which he is neurotypical, in which he does not hit his head in frustration or bite his sleeve because his emotions are boiling over and he cannot voice them. This book, like his previous one The Reason I Jump, as well as his everyday communication, is the product of pointing to letters on an alphabet board, or sometimes using a computer; he does not speak except for a few stock phrases. On the face of it he is as far from Laura James, the author of Odd Girl Out, as Japan is from Norfolk; she is a journalist and the owner of a communications agency, used to interviewing the famous. Yet both are autistic (or "have autism": some prefer, but others hate, "person-first" language).

It has become a truism to say that "when you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism", but the heterogeneity in this behaviourally diagnosed condition is striking. Many have begun to talk of "the autisms", reflecting the belief that there are many different (largely genetic) aetiologies. The psychiatrist Lorna Wing (1928-2014) coined the term "autism spectrum" to try to capture the variety of ways in which the condition's defining social and communication difficulties, and its rigid and repetitive behaviours and interests, can be manifest. A young child who doesn't speak, spends hours spinning the wheels of a toy car and doesn't go to his parents even when hurt or upset, and an adult who monologues eruditely about one obscure aspect of astrophysics, oblivious to the listener's confusion or boredom, may both be on the autism spectrum. And the spectrum is multidimensional, so talk of "high-" or "low-functioning", or "severe" or "mild" autism is not only offensive but largely inaccurate. The novelist David Mitchell, in his introduction to Higashida's book--which Mitchell also translated with his wife Keiko Yoshida--suggests instead a calibration in terms of ink-cartridge colours, "with yellow at the Asperger's end, magenta at the harder-core pole and cyan in the middle, as in: 'Well his autism's functionally fairly cyan, but if people are telling him NO! all the time it can get splotchy with magenta ... when he's ... kicking ass at Temple Run ... his autism glows canary yellow'". He is describing his own son.

Perhaps it is because of this diversity that the diagnosis is sometimes met with scepticism. Laura James, who was diagnosed in middle age, writes that well-meaning people often doubt that she can be autistic because she is married with children. She quotes Steve Silberman, the author of Neurotribes, who reports that neurotypicals are...