The degree to which Bai Juyi's poetry outshone that of his Tang contemporaries in the Japanese constellation of the poetic universe is quite remarkable and is not merely a reflection of the contemporary Chinese canon. The incorporation of Bai's poetry, and by extension other literary texts from China, into the Heian literary world view is reflected by Wakan roeishu, edited by Fujiwara no Kinto. Wakan roeishu is an anthology of poetry in Chinese or Sino-Japanese and Japanese organized in thematic rubrics. Compiler Fujiwara no Kinto juxtaposed waka with over eighth hundred couplets by Japanese and Chinese kanshi poets. Wakan roeishu is divided into two books, or volumes. The first book covers the four seasons, in gradual procession from early spring to the end of winter and the end of the year. The second book is a miscellaneous arrangement of often intriguing categories, from monkeys and recluses to courtesans and the color white.

Manyoshu is Japan's oldest extant anthology of vernacular verse and the most revered repository of its classical poetic tradition. Just as Kojiki and Nihon shoki were compiled with the aid of earlier histories that do not survive, Manyoshu drew material from numerous other lost Japanese anthologies that are cited in its pages. The anthology was compiled during the greatest period of social change in premodern Japanese history. Manyoshu begins with a courting verse for a maiden gathering herbs on a hillside; it was purported to have been composed by Emperor Yuryaku, who was remembered as an exemplar. From the accession in 629 of the ruler known as Emperor Jomei, attributions of authorship gain historical plausibility; the number of poems markedly increases. Jomei ascended the throne after the death of the female sovereign Suiko, the last ruler represented in the Kojiki. The characterization of Manyoshu as a text that was widely read through the centuries is a modern myth.