ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Konjaku Hyakki Shūi

Konjaku Hyakki Shūi is a book from a long, long time ago in Japan. It's a book full of scary stories about ghosts and monsters, kind of like a really old version of Goosebumps or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

The name Konjaku Hyakki Shūi means "A Collection of a Hundred Demons from the Present and the Past." So it's basically a book full of creepy creatures.

People in Japan used to really like scary stories, and they would tell them to each other at night to scare themselves. They believed that there were lots of different kinds of ghosts and monsters in the world, and this book tries to describe all of them.

Some of the things in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi are really weird and spooky. There's a ghost that looks like a giant eyeball. There's a monster that's made out of dust and cobwebs. And there's a creature that's just a big, creepy hand.

Even though it's really old, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi is still really famous in Japan today. People still read it and talk about it, because even though it's scary, it's also really fun to be scared sometimes.