  Let $X^n\in\mathcal{X}^n$ be a sequence drawn from a discrete memoryless
source, and let $Y^n\in\mathcal{Y}^n$ be the corresponding reconstruction
sequence that is output by a good rate-distortion code. This paper establishes
a property of the joint distribution of $(X^n,Y^n)$. It is shown that for
$D>0$, the input-output statistics of a $R(D)$-achieving rate-distortion code
converge (in normalized relative entropy) to the output-input statistics of a
discrete memoryless channel (dmc). The dmc is "backward" in that it is a
channel from the reconstruction space $\mathcal{Y}^n$ to source space
$\mathcal{X}^n$. It is also shown that the property does not necessarily hold
when normalized relative entropy is replaced by variational distance.
