travellers from the distant past

“travellers from the distant past” is Naoki Higashida’s speculative name for autistic people, imagined as humans with primeval senses who stand outside the ordinary flow of civilized life. The phrase gathers the book’s accounts of sensory distress, difficulty expressing oneself, and estrangement from clock time into a single image; it also offers a counter to the social habit of treating autistic people as less mature or less emotionally complex than they are.

A primeval perspective

In his answer about autism itself, Naoki presents the idea as his own made-up theory, not as a scientific explanation. He imagines autistic people as born outside the regime of civilization and suggests that autism has somehow arisen in response to humanity’s killings and selfish destruction of the planet. The account is deliberately conjectural: rather than claim to explain a medical cause, it recasts autism as a perspective that might remind the wider world of what matters to Earth.

The image reaches further back than human society. Naoki wonders why aquatic life evolved, emerged onto dry land, and became human beings whose lives are ruled by time. He imagines a distant, watery past as a place of quiet and freedom, where nobody hassles autistic people and where staying still or swimming does not demand the same negotiation with time. In that setting, the body can feel at one with time’s pulse rather than hurried through it.

Time, sensation, and constraint

The primeval image connects to Naoki’s account of time as difficult to grasp. Time, he explains, has no clear boundaries; its passing cannot be captured on paper, and clock hands show that time has passed without making that passage physically felt. The uncertainty is frightening because a future moment raises questions about what condition a person will be in and what problems may arise. Against this uneasy, abstract duration, water offers a rare sense of being unhurried and free.

The contrast is not simply between land and water, but between environments that can be endured and those that overwhelm. Naoki describes certain noises as frightening because continued listening can make a person lose a sense of where they are: the ground seems to shake and the surrounding landscape to come toward them. Cupping the ears becomes a way to protect oneself and regain orientation. Since the noises that cause distress differ from person to person, the response cannot be reduced to a universal sensory rule; Naoki says that gradually pressing his hands less heavily helped him become accustomed to some sounds, while emphasizing the importance of feeling safe.

The phrase’s freedom is therefore sharply qualified. Naoki says autistic people have no freedom because they are different kinds of humans, born with primeval senses, outside normal time, unable to express themselves, and carried through life by their own bodies. That description places the imagined distance from civilization alongside immediate constraints: temporal uncertainty, sensory fear, and the difficulty of making inner experience intelligible to other people. The watery past is not a reported memory but a counter-image to a present in which the environment and the body can feel hard to manage.

Expression and social interpretation

The book links this sense of being cut off from ordinary human exchange to a specific communicative difficulty. Naoki explains that speech does not reliably convey what he intends: even a yes-or-no answer can be misunderstood, and when communication fails he may be unable to correct it. He describes hating himself and falling silent after such breakdowns, while stressing that autistic people want others to understand what is in their hearts and minds and have feelings much like anyone else’s. The image of distant travellers thus names not an absence of inner life, but a gap between inner experience and what speech allows others to recognize.

That gap is widened by assumptions imposed from outside. Naoki objects to being spoken to as if he were a toddler simply because he may appear younger than his age, and asks instead to be addressed in language appropriate to his age. He also rejects the claim that autistic people prefer solitude: he says they may withdraw because they fear causing trouble or getting on other people’s nerves, even though they want company. Being left alone can become a learned outcome of social difficulty, not a chosen preference. These accounts turn the distant-past metaphor toward the present: estrangement is not only a matter of different perception, but also of how other people interpret and respond to it.

An individual account offered outward

Naoki’s metaphor belongs to a book that presents an autistic teenager’s explanations to readers seeking to understand autistic experience. Its prefatory framing cautions that he was only thirteen when he wrote the answers and is not a guru; the book also recognizes that autistic people vary, comparing individual differences to retina patterns rather than a single uniform condition. His claim that autistic people share a primeval orientation is therefore best read as a personal, imaginative generalization within that larger acknowledgment of variation, not as a clinical description applicable in identical form to everyone.

The account is offered as an act of communication. Naoki explains that training with Ms Suzuki at Hagukumi School and his mother enabled him to communicate through writing, including on a computer, and that many autistic children do not have an equivalent means to express themselves. He hopes his explanations can help readers understand what may be happening in autistic minds and become better friends to autistic people. In that context, “travellers from the distant past” makes difference imaginable without presenting it as emptiness: the traveller may be difficult for others to read, but has a perspective, fears, hopes, and a wish to be understood. The book’s final movement is toward connection, asking readers to listen rather than judge a person by appearance.