His name is Tajomaru and he claims to have killed the samurai, named Kanazawa no Takehiro, but not the woman. His account of events goes something like this. He sees the woman on the street and decides he must have her. He decides to kill the man then and there. Tajomaru leads them into a trap where he knocks out the samurai and ties him up. He finds his wife, Masago, and leads her to her husband, she notices and pulls out a knife. He disarms her pretty quickly and does the deed. Tajomaru starts to leave but the woman grabs him and declares that he or her husband should die today. Then Tajomaru unties the samurai and they fight. Takehiro loses and is stabbed in the chest on the twenty-third swing of Tajomaru's sword. So Tajomaru searches for the woman but she is no longer there: "I searched for her among the cedars, but the bamboo leaves on the ground showed no sigh that she had ever been there" (308-309). This is Tajomaru's side of the story and it seems sincere