During the early medieval period the samurai were drawn to aristocratic and court culture of the capital, as the Heike had been. The prominent samurai waka poet was Minamoto no Sanetomo, who took an interest in Manyoshu-style poetry. One of the main characteristics of medieval literature is that much of it was produced by groups rather than by individuals, in military chronicles like The Tales of the Heike and the Taiheiki. Aristocratic literature in the medieval period was characterized by strong nostalgia for the Heian past and an emphasis on preserving court traditions. Two literary figures of the late Muromachi period were Shotetsu and the renga master Sogi, of uncertain origins, who wrote influential treatises on renga and numerous commentaries on the classics. Setsuwa literature were collected from as early as the Nara period and appeared in the late Heian period in the massive Konjaku monogatari shu. Buddhist writings in the Heian period were always written in Literary Sinitic.

The Heike monogatari or The Tales of the Heike is a long medieval narrative, extant in multiple variants, about the rise and fall of Taira Kiyomori and the Heike warrior house in the course of the twelfth century. The first half of the Heike narrate the rapid rise and consolidation of Kiyomori's power, alternating praise with censure. The second half of the Heike narrates the defeat of the Heike by the Genji forces, first led by Kiso no Yoshinaka, who drives the Heike into flight and exile from the capital; and then by Minamoto no Yoshitsune, who defeats them in two battles. As the Heike variants circulated throughout the fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries, copied and recopied by multiple hands, the story continued to propagate and gain ever larger audiences across all classes of Japanese society, reaching a peak of popularity in the golden age of Heike performance in the fifteenth century.