This is the show that slows your pulse down against your will. Three stories an episode, ten minutes each, and the animation style changes every time: brushwork here, flat cutout paper there, colors that look like someone stained them into the frame rather than filled them in. The two narrators do every voice themselves, grandfather and grandmother trading off, and that voice-in-the-room quality is the whole trick. You already know the peach boy and the princess found inside the bamboo stalk, but the real finds are the unnamed ones, the greedy neighbor who gets exactly what he asked for, the old man coaxing blossoms out of a dead cherry tree. It carries the Tohoku thread the earlier run started after 2011, still telling the north's stories back to it. Watch three at night and you'll sleep better than you have in weeks.

A sequel to Furusato Saisei: Nihon no Mukashibanashi, this 50-episode TV series returns to the folktales Japanese children hear again and again from their parents and grandparents. Its tradition includes a boy who emerges from a peach, a lunar princess found in a stalk of bamboo, and an elderly man who makes a withered cherry tree flower again. Short stories like these show young listeners both the dark and the bright sides of life, handing down traditional moral values from one generation to the next, with a supernatural touch.