[2][3] Three of his novels have been turned into feature films; Mōryō no Hako, which won the 1996 Mystery Writers of Japan Award, was also made into an anime television series, as was Kosetsu Hyaku Monogatari, and his book Loups=Garous was adapted into an anime feature film.

This preference was strongly influenced by Shigeru Mizuki (水木しげる), who is an eminent yokai specialist.

Kyogoku considers yōkai folklore to be a form of sublimation and applied this idea to his novels.

Nevertheless, in his writing, yōkai themselves don't appear, except as fables, which serve to explicate the criminal characters' motives.

In Kyogoku's works, especially the Kyōgokudō (京極堂) Series, the main character Akihiko Chuzenji (中禅寺 秋彦, Chūzenji Akihiko) solves a case by clearing up a possession; this technique is called Tsukimono-Otoshi, the most striking aspect of his novels.

Chuzenji does Tsukimono-Otoshi as part of his rhetoric he uses in exposing the criminal character's hidden pathos, and likens the emotion to a particular yōkai folklore.

In Kodansha Novels version of this series, the covers are illustrations drawn by Shirou Tatsumi (辰巳四郎) and Ayako Ishiguro (石黒亜矢子), and in Kodansha Bunko version, the covers are photographs of paper dolls made by Ryō Arai (荒井良).

I sense that is contemptible, because not interest to the story but physical factor force readers to read.

That technique enables readers to perceive the curious blank where the important sentences are written.