The Three Women, the Bear and the Fox

A traveller returns to a town where he once lived, passes by a house where he had once lived with a woman, passes by a nursing home where a woman for whom he once worked now lives, and arrives at a house where he is asked to watch over the body of a dead woman.

According to the footnote to the New York Times printing, the story is inspired by legend number 101 in Kunio Yanagita's "The Legends of Tono", a collection of 119 Japanese folk tales, published in 1910.