Strange Tales: Past and Present

Konjaku Monogatari is a representative work of classical Japanese literature, recounting folk legends from the late Heian period. The complete work runs to more than thirty volumes. This book selects the most captivating and representative chapters, including the widely known Japanese tale of the dog-head silk, the legend of the Hashihaka burial mound, stories of fox spirits and a spirit tortoise repaying a kindness, and secret accounts of wronged spirits seeking justice... Each story carries profound moral and cultural meaning, extolling truth, goodness, and beauty while condemning falsehood, evil, and ugliness.

Konjaku Monogatari had a considerable influence on later literary works and became a model for subsequent monogatari. The renowned Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa and celebrated film director Akira Kurosawa both explicitly described it as a "source of inspiration" for their work. Akutagawa also called it "a human comedy of ancient Japan." Much of Baku Yumemakura's Onmyoji series is drawn from this book. Its distinctive quality as "a compendium of storytelling literature" has also given it a vital place in world literature, where it is widely recognized as a "treasure trove of source material for world literature."