At dusk, a mysterious old man wearing a yellow mask appears at a children’s playground. Known only as the Storyteller, his true name and origin are unknown. He gathers a small audience of children and proceeds to recite sinister tales drawn from Japanese urban legends and folklore, using a traditional kamishibai—a paper-scrolling device that uses illustrated boards to bring his demented narration to life. Each episode of this horror anthology runs approximately four minutes, presenting a self-contained story that begins with the Storyteller’s introduction and ends with a chilling conclusion.

The stories themselves take place in modern Japan, with ordinary settings such as apartments, hospitals, schools, and offices becoming the stages for supernatural encounters. The first episode, The Talisman Woman, follows a bachelor who moves into a new apartment and finds a protective talisman stuck to his ceiling. After he removes it, a strange woman begins staring at him from across the street, leading to a terrifying invasion of his home by a swarm of ghosts. Other tales explore different horrors, such as a hospital patient who cannot leave his room due to a reversed ritual called Zanbai, or a family that follows a sinister rule involving a nightly ritual named Calm Through Laughter.

The series maintains a consistent framing device that evolves over time. In the first two seasons, the yellow-masked Storyteller is a fixed presence at a playground every day at 5 p.m.. The third season changes this format, replacing the old man with a boy who sits on a playground slide, singing a cryptic song as he draws illustrations of the creatures in the stories. The boy is later revealed to be the Storyteller in a child’s form. Later seasons return to the original kamishibai narrator but shift his location: he tells his tales to a crowd of females in a silhouette in season five, from a forest in season six, inside a dark apartment in season seven, at a busy urban intersection in season eight, and to the animals of the Chinese zodiac in season nine. There are no recurring protagonists across the episodes, as each story features a new set of characters who encounter ghosts, yokai, cursed objects, or other supernatural entities. The only recurring presence is the Storyteller himself, voiced by Kanji Tsuda.