The house of Kitagawa Kiyoshi, deputy mayor of Tsuchibuchi village, is at Hiishi. His family were yamabushi, mountain ascetics, for generations, and his grandfather Shofukuin was a scholar who left many writings and served the village well.
Kiyoshi's younger brother Fukuji married into a family at Tanohama on the coast. But in the great tsunami some years ago he lost his wife and a child, and he lived for about a year with his two surviving children in a hut he built on the site of the old house.
It was a moonlit night in early summer. Fukuji got up to go to the toilet. It stood some distance away, and the path to it ran along the beach where the waves broke.
It was a night of fog. Out of the fog a man and a woman came toward him. He looked, and the woman was without any doubt his dead wife.
Without thinking he followed them, all the way to a cave on a headland toward Funakoshi village. When he called her name, his wife turned and smiled.
He looked at the man, and he too was from the same village and had died in the tsunami. Before Fukuji married in, he had heard, this man and his wife had loved each other deeply.
"Now I am married to him," his wife said, so Fukuji said:
"Don't you love your children?"
At that his wife's face changed a little, and she wept.
He did not feel he was talking with the dead. Sad and wretched, he hung his head and looked at his feet, and meanwhile the two walked quickly away, rounded the shoulder of the hill on the road to Oura, and disappeared.
He tried to follow, but then it struck him that they were dead. He stood in the middle of the road thinking until dawn, and in the morning he went home.
After that, they say, Fukuji was ill for a long time.
* "The great tsunami some years ago" is the Meiji Sanriku tsunami of 1896.