The eighth-century ritsuryo state system, with its system of ranks, ministries, and university, continued to operate throughout the Heian period and provided the framework for a court-based state system, which emerged at the beginning of the tenth century. One of the major characteristics of this court-based state was gradual concentration of power outside the capital in the provincial governors, drawn from middle-rank aristocrats, who were the fathers of women writers of this period. The early Heian period was marked by the continued prominence of Chinese-based literature and culture and the gradual introduction of vernacular cultural forms, particularly the court-based vernacular literature written in kana, a new syllabary, which flourished from the tenth century onward. One of the striking characteristics of the emergence of Japanese vernacular literature was the central role played by women writers who were closely associated with the imperial court in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon.

For all periods of premodern Japanese literature, and indeed, for all premodern literatures, what survives is only a portion of the writings that were produced, but this situation is more extreme for the Nara and early Heian periods than for any subsequent point in Japanese history. Until the mid seventh century literacy remained the province of specialist scribes who were employed by the Yamato Kings, rulers from the area of modern Nara and Osaka who presided over a loose federation of local potentates spanning the archipelago from Northern Kyushu to the Kanto region. The importation of Buddhism in the mid to late sixth century introduced new kinds of texts and new modes of literacy, but these too remained narrow, specialized pursuits. The legitimacy of imperial rule by Tenmu's and Jito's successors was supported by a melange of symbols and rituals with complex origins. Similarly, early Japanese poetry and prose drew on a wide range of sources, foreign and domestic.

In the early Heian period state power declined, except in the capitals (kokufu) of the sixty-five (or sixty-six) provinces. While the central government declined, these provincial offices (kokuga) retained, and even increased, their power over local land and people as local elites took over their functions: the collection of taxes, the administration of land, and the promotion of agriculture. This chapter focuses on these changes that took place during the ninth and tenth centuries. The provincial governments turned out to be unique bargaining grounds for the division of resources between capital and countryside, and that function, combined with the functions of the governments as repositories and redistributors of wealth, ensured their survival well beyond the Heian period. In 731, a new system of policing provincial officers was put into operation, which the custodial aspects of office, forcing incoming governors to seek out and take charge of all government assets that were supposed to be on hand, particularly tax-grain.