The tradition of the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai in Japan goes back to the Edo period, and is culturally intertwined with its Buddhism. The practice of sitting around in a circle telling ghost stories is not unique to Japan, of course, but the prevalence of a formal activity with rules in which to do so is certainly worth looking at. There were are even books published centuries ago just like this one, containing 100 ghost stories inside. You would memorize a few and then tell them at such a gathering.
The Hyakkumonogatari is a common enough framing device for J-horror manga. Hokazono Masaya's Aka Ihon (Red Book) is one example of this. However, this story is not a pure Hyakkumonogatari, despite containing 100 ghost stories—telling a single story a night actually ties it in with another cultural thread, the "in 100 days" trope (see "The Convenience Store Clerk Will Get Rescued in 100 Days" and "These Two Will Be Married In 100 Days", etc.). So those are the cultural lineages of this story in particular.
As an episodic work, we judge this story on the strength of its collected tales. As a piece of serial fiction, we judge this story on the degree to which we find its recurring narrators and overarching narrative compelling. On both fronts, this story would receive passing marks, but to judge them separately misses the whole. The real innovation we see here is actually in the repeated insight that the story someone tells often informs you far less about whatever it is they're talking about than the nature of the speaker themselves. Hina, for example, tends to tell "uplifting" ghost stories of helpful ghosts, moral protagonists, and the like. The episodic ghost stories are used to reveal the thoughts and anxieties of the narrator, their indirect thoughts on the serial drama. That is what elevates this series.
In that sense, this series is a great introduction to the idea of horror in general. The first and most important observation that a horror reader makes is that the monster is not literally the monster: Godzilla is not literally a lizard, but nuclear war, and the presence of Godzilla as a story gives us insight into the postwar Japanese psyche.
