Cicadas

Cicadas serve as a vivid comparison for autistic restlessness in Naoki Higashida’s account: their cries and hurried struggle to seize the summer give shape to a life that feels persistently out of step with time. The image turns an apparently comic fidgetiness into an expression of urgency and unease.

The Image of Perpetual Summer

Higashida describes people with autism as restless and fidgety, seeming to move as though summer lasted all year. While most people appear relaxed when nothing in particular is happening, autistic people are compared to a child rushing because they are late for school. The contrast makes ordinary stillness and hurried movement feel like different experiences of time, rather than simply different manners or levels of activity.

The cicadas intensify the comparison. Their buzzing and chirring accompanies an image of ceaseless motion: autistic people cry, shout, and keep struggling against time instead of resting. The sounds make the metaphor more than a visual likeness; they give its urgency a voice.

A Brief Life and Uneasy Time

As autumn approaches, the cicadas’ lives come to an end. Human beings, by contrast, still have plenty of time ahead. Higashida sets this difference beside his description of autistic people as semi-detached from time’s flow: although they may have a long human life before them, they remain uneasy from sunrise to sunset.

The comparison does not present the cicadas’ short life as a literal explanation of autism. Instead, their seasonal limit provides a sharp image for the feeling of having to hurry, call out, and struggle against time even when time has not run out. Cicadas thus make visible the tension between the human future that remains and the persistent urgency of the present.

Meaning in the Book

The image challenges the impression that restless movement is merely comic. By placing it beside the cicadas’ cries and the approach of autumn, Higashida connects outward behavior with an inner experience of unease. The comparison is part of the book’s larger effort to explain autistic experience in the speaker’s own terms, while its first-person account remains a particular perspective rather than a universal description of every autistic person.