Award-winning author of "Cloud Atlas" David Mitchell, with the help of his wife, has translated autistic teenager Naoki Higashida's 'revelatory' memoir into an English book.

Japanese memoir "The Reason I Jump" by autistic teenager Naoki Higashida is being translated into English by author David Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida. Yoshida, whose son is also autistic, spotted the memoir for the first time online in 2006. In the book, Higashida touches upon topics that include why he doesn't have a proper conversation with others, why he doesn't make eye contact with anyone and how he hates being talked down upon.

Hoping that this may help their son, Yoshida and her author husband began translating the memoir only for their son and a few friends. However, as they continued with the translation, they realized that the English version of the book could help a lot of other people as well.

"I could see how helpful it was for her in terms of understanding the autism in our own domestic situation," said Mitchell. "She did the heavy lifting from the Japanese into English, and in a sense I provided the stylistic icing on the cake. But I also needed to respect the fact that it was a 13-year-old boy writing, not a 44-year-old novelist, so it couldn't sound as if it was written for the New Yorker."

Through the book, young Higashida has hoped to provide an inside view of the world of autism. He speaks about noise, beauty, time and how he feels about people around him.

"He points to each letter with his finger, and someone at his side collects the words and the sentences and the paragraphs. He's 13, and he's more of a writer than I am," said Mitchell, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. "He can use a keyboard directly, but feels the cardboard has fewer distractions, and focuses him better."

The book will be published in English this July by Mitchell's publisher Sceptre.