Higashida is the Japanese writer and author of The Reason I Jump. Born in 1992, Higashida was diagnosed with nonspeaking autism when he was five and learned to communicate using a Japanese character alphabet grid. It was through this grid that Higashida was able to write The Reason I Jump when he was 13, a book that was subsequently published in Japan in 2007. Despite controversy over his authorship of The Reason I Jump, Higashida has gone on to write and publish more books in Japan, including children’s and picture books, poems, and essays. He has also recently written Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight (2017) about his experience of living with autism as a young adult, which has been translated into English.

A Japanese television documentary of The Reason I Jump was produced in 2014, and an English-language documentary film of the book was produced in 2020, the latter winning the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Higashida continues to give talks about autism in Japan.