(from ebookjapan):

In the second year of Tempo, the year of the great harvest, three prisoners attacked a family that had fled Katsunuma, Koshu.

When the husband was killed and the wife was about to be raped, it was saved by Kisaburo, a childhood friend of the wife Otsuru, who had run away from the village 15 years earlier after killing a man. Kisaburo was pursued by a secret agent of the Owari Clan.

The two men confront each other in the starving, abandoned village!