Sarutahiko's own death, recorded immediately after his celebrated guidance of the heavenly descent, is a stranger and more abrupt episode than the guidance myth usually receives credit for. According to the Kojiki, after leading Ninigi safely to earth and escorting his new wife Ame-no-Uzume back toward his own country, Sarutahiko went fishing at a place called Azaka in Ise, and while he was fishing a shellfish, called a hirame in the text, caught and clamped down on his hand; struggling in the sea, he was pulled under and drowned.
The text does not treat the death as a defeat or a punishment but records it almost as a natural incident, and it goes on to derive further divine names from the event, a spirit born of his sinking beneath the waves and another from the froth and bubbles that rose to the surface as he drowned. The episode ties Sarutahiko permanently to the Ise region and to the sea, in addition to his more famous role as guide of the crossroads on dry land, and it is one of the reasons his cult has old roots around Ise and along the coast there, quite apart from his shrine at Tsubaki further inland. The abruptness of the story, a guiding god of imposing size undone by an ordinary shellfish, has drawn comment from scholars as an example of the matter of fact tone Japanese myth can take even toward the deaths of major kami.