Things do sometimes go backward.
This truism hit me recently while I was checking the galleys of "Persona," my biography, with Naoki Inose, of Yukio Mishima. I was deep in the proofreading when the publisher's agent asked if I knew of two earlier books in English on the author who chose to die by disembowelment and decapitation. I didn't.
Just about the same time, I needed to check the three old issues of Life magazine with direct bearings on Mishima I had bought from a California vendor. Let me talk about these three issues first.