A yellow-masked figure known only as the Storyteller appears at dusk in a childrens playground. His true name and origin are unknown. He carries a traditional kamishibai, a paper-scrolling device, and uses it to recite sinister tales based on Japanese urban legends and folklore to a small group of children who listen with an eerie stillness. This framing device introduces each episode of the series, which is an anthology of short, self-contained horror stories.

Each episode runs approximately four minutes and is animated in a rough, stylized manner that mimics the look of paper cutouts, enhancing the unsettling atmosphere. The stories themselves are not connected by recurring characters, but by common themes of everyday terror. The first episode, titled The Talisman Woman, follows a young bachelor named Ito who moves into a new apartment and finds a protective talisman on his ceiling. After he removes it, he feels a malevolent glare and notices a strange woman watching him from the building across the street. His decision to tear down the talismans invites a supernatural invasion into his home. Other early episodes, such as Contradiction, explore the unreliability of perception, telling the same story of a visit to a haunted hospital from two different perspectives, where each friend claims the others face was replaced by something monstrous. The season one finale, Tormentor, involves a group of schoolboys who spy on a house rumored to be the home of a supernatural entity, leading one of them to mimic the jerky, dancing movements of the residents and disappear.

As the series progresses beyond the first season, the core concept remains the same, but the framing evolves. Later seasons feature the Storyteller in different settings, including a forest, a dark apartment, and a busy urban intersection, though his role as the narrator of horrifying fables endures. The narrative focus always returns to the victims of these ghost stories, who are typically ordinary people—college students, new tenants, families, and schoolchildren—whose curiosity or a single poor decision leads them into a nightmare from which there is no escape. The series presents a world where safety is an illusion and where the most mundane locations, such as an apartment, a hospital room, or a city street, can become a stage for supernatural torment.