Sugawara no Michizane ranks among the best-known poets of the Heian period, although he must be among the least often read. Through the Nara period, Michizane's ancestors had served as minor officials at court. The move of the capital to Heian marked a change in the family's fortunes. By the time of Michizane's birth, the Sugawara were known as a family of court scholars. In Michizane's world, scholarship meant a form of Sinology that combined mastery of the Chinese classics with the ability to make practical use of such knowledge. Compositions included both prose and poetry, both official documents and personal expressions. Michizane also wrote waka and associated with some of the major waka poets of his day. Most of Michizane's prose consists of official documents and religious writings, often drafted for others less skilled at composition in Chinese. In Japanese, one rarely wrote of love for one's children. In Chinese, Michizane wrote very affecting poems on that subject.

The first genre in the long history of Japanese literature to be published commercially for a readership consisting primarily of commoner women, ninjobon became immensely popular. Tamenaga Shunsui stands at the center of this genre with such representative works as Shunshoku umegoyomi or Plum Calendar of Spring Colors, Shunshoku tatsumi no sono, and Harutsuge dori. This chapter discusses the story of Plum Calendar of Spring Colors. Women began entering the workforce, albeit in auxiliary roles, around the nineteenth century, implying a higher rate of literacy. Furthermore, as may be gathered from the growing popularity of kabuki, a new tendency prevailed whereby city women, endowed now with a surplus of both time and money, participated more actively in the various modes of public entertainment in cities. Reading Shunsui's ninjobon, everyone gain an understanding of just how different the concept of romance in Edo was in comparison to the authors own modern one.

Gozan Bungaku encompasses a vast corpus of texts in literary Chinese produced by Zen monks during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Gozan or "Five Mountains" designates the top five ranks of the Rinzai Zen monastic system and also stands for the system as a whole, which at its height included hundreds of temples and sub-temples throughout Japan. The poetry produced by Gozan monks is usually considered to have the literary interest. Sesson Yubai may be taken as representative of the early-period of Gozan poetry. The peak of Gozan poetry is represented by Gido Shushin and Zekkai Chushin. Both wrote in regulated verse forms and had their poetry praised by Chinese readers. The famous Zen monk of the medieval era, Ikkyu Sojun was not a Gozan monk. As an adolescent, he chose study with monks of the Daitoku-ji lineage. Daitoku-ji Temple had been demoted from Gozan status by the Ashikaga bakufu for political reasons and it opted out of the system.

This chapter focuses on five major diaries or nikies of the Heian period: Tosa Diary, Kagero Diary, Izumi shikibu Diary, Murasaki shikibu Diary, and Sarashina Diary. The Tosa Diary chronicles a fifty-five-day journey taken by the author Ki no Tsurayuki, his family and entourage back to the capital in 934 after his period of service as provincial governor in Tosa province. Although his official career was not distinguished and he composed the Japanese preface to that anthology, which was the first attempt to write discursively in vernacular Japanese. The major diaries of the Heian period were all reproduced in woodblock editions during the Tokugawa period, making them available to a general audience. These diaries were given an important place in the modern canon of Japanese literature. They were first hailed as early forerunners of the "I-Novel", a form of autobiographical fiction that dominated Japanese literary production in the Meiji and Taisho periods.

The earliest extant works of the Japanese tradition date to the early eighth century, during the first decade of the Nara capital. The Kojiki and Nihon shoki are important for their content, a mix of myth, legend, and history, interspersed with poetry, and for the very different styles in which they were written. Kojiki is divided into three books, the first of which describes an early age of the gods, beginning with heaven and earth coming into existence and ending with accounts of the descent of Ninigi. The second book portrays the origins of rule by legendary sovereigns, starting with Jinmu, and describes the expansion of their realm, following reign-by-reign until that of the fifteenth legendary ruler, Ojin. The third book continues from the sixteenth ruler, Nintoku, to Suiko, whose reign represented the beginning of a new era for eighth-century historians. The Nihon shoki provides historians with a fundamental chronology of events in early Japan, especially for the seventh century.