The stories collected here were written over the past seven years for a monthly Japan Times column called The Living Past. They range from earliest prehistory to modern times. The column still runs. The living past is inexhaustible. It never runs out of stories to tell. Column and book both were born of the conviction that the past, as the inrushing future engulfs it, is worth preserving - not only preserving but participating in, living in. Each story invites the reader to think, as the author did in writing it, "What would I have been if I'd lived then? What would I be doing, what thinking?" Try it. It's a wonderful form of self-discovery.