I think I'll stop here.
He frightens you with his writing about a strange fish called the Old Man living in the northern seas.
No human has seen the entire body of this huge fish that stretches five to seven miles long. In rare sightings, it resembles several large islands floating on the ocean. Little by little the tail fin on the back of this Old Man becomes visible. It swallows a whale twenty or thirty fathoms down like a whale swallows sardines. Therefore, when this fish comes, the whales flee to the east and west.…
When delayed one night in Minmaya, the elderly folks from nearby homes came to visit; the grandfathers and grandmothers gathered around the hearth in the home. Together they talked about various subjects. No story was as chilling as the tsunami at Matsumae twenty or thirty years ago. At that time, the winds were quiet and the rains were far away, but they felt empty. At moments during the night, shooting stars flew across the empty sky to the east and to the west and gradually grew to a large number. Four or five days earlier, all sorts of deities flew through the sky even in broad daylight. They looked like court officials in full dress riding horseback or riding dragons or riding clouds or riding a type of rhinoceros or elephant, and transformed into a white costume. With the appearance of red and blue colors, the forms became large and small and fill the skies with strange-looking deities and Buddhas flying to the east and to the west.
Every day, we all went outside and prayed in gratitude. For four or five days, we prayed and talked about the extraordinary events before our eyes. One evening, while looking out to sea, far off in the distance we saw something like a mountain of pure white snow. Look at that! As we looked at the mysterious object in the sea, it slowly crept toward us. Looking closely, above what appeared to be the island mountain, we saw a gigantic wave coming towards us. Tsunami! Run! Young and old, men and women scrambled to get away, but it approached rapidly. Of the houses, fields, plants, and birds and animals, not even a few remained. Only waste remained on the sea floor. Not one person from the villages on the coast survived. For that reason, the deities flying in the clouds at the beginning foretold this horrible event and were urging us to flee this land.
Events that seemed sacrilegious or from a dream are fluently written in plain text. In the current environment, I thought it best not to be too specific. You may call this absurd, but it's fun to copy the travel diary of an ancient and be immersed in a world resembling a fairy tale. In fact, I had reasons for including a few excerpts from the articles in Toyuki. I have one more. I'd like to introduce an article I think will especially amuse aficionados of novels.
Around the time I was in Sotogahama in Tsugaru, Oshu, a local government official repeatedly asked if anyone was from Tango. When asked why, his reason was a god of Mount Iwaki in Tsugaru detests men from Tango. If anyone from Tango sneaks into this land, the gods wreak havoc with the weather. The wind and rain never cease, and ships cannot enter or leave causing great hardship to the Tsugaru region.
Terrible winds continued while I was there prompting me to search for someone from Tango. Any time the weather deteriorated, the officials conducted strict inquiries. If one had entered, he was quickly expelled. When anyone from Tango left the domain of Tsugaru, the weather immediately cleared up and the winds calmed down. As well as being a hatred handed down as a custom, curiously, the officials conducted searches each time.
At Aomori, Minmaya, and other ports along the Sotogahama Road, the people of Tango were the most hated. When questioned closely for the reason why they were hated so much, the story was the god of Mount Iwaki in this province enshrines Princess Anju in the land of her birth.
The princess wandered into the province of Tango and was tormented by the bailiff Sansho. These days, anyone from that province is hated; winds and rain start; and the gods of Iwaki go wild. Along the 220 miles of Sotogahama, most of the people fished and hunted for a living or worked in ship transportation, and always prayed for favorable winds. However, whenever the weather deteriorated, the people of Tango were hated. This opinion is held at the borders, the southern part of Matsumae, and the ports, and hatred is sent to people from Tango. This much malice runs deep in people.
This story is strange. The people of Tango are greatly inconvenienced. The land of Tango is north of Kyoto Prefecture, but people from there who come to Tsugaru must pay dearly. We learned of the story of Princess Anju and Prince Tsushi as children from picture books. Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff), the masterpiece written by Mori Ogai, is well known to anyone who loves novels. The beautiful sister and brother in this tragic tale were born in Tsugaru and enshrined in Mount Iwaki after their deaths. This is not well known. In fact, I find the story doubtful.
Nankei calmly wrote about Yoshitsune coming to Tsugaru, the seven-mile-long fish, the red scales of fish and the red water dyed by the color of dissolved rocks. These may
