Three relatively new genres, kyoshi, kyoka, and senryu, came to the fore in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, Japanese literati had naturalized the medium of Chinese poetry, adapting it to their own tastes and needs. Waka poets wrote kyoka, a parodic and popular form of the thirty-one syllable waka, as a form of amusement, in much the same way that Japanese kanshi poets composed kyoshi. Kyoka relied heavily on complex and witty wordplay and incorporated socially diverse content that broke the bounds of classical waka. The seventeen-syllable senryu became popular in the 1750s. Senryu covered a broad range of topics of interest to contemporary audiences, particularly in Edo, which had become a major metropolis by the mid eighteenth century. The fundamental differences between modern haiku and senryu can be traced to their historical origins. Haiku was originally the opening verse of a linked-verse sequence, and senryu was an offshoot of the added verse.

Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book represents the rival salon of Empress Teishi. Like many of the other diaries by court women, the Pillow Book can be seen as a memorial to the author's patron, specifically a homage to the Naka no Kanpaku family and a literary prayer to the spirit of the deceased empress Teishi. The roughly three hundred discrete sections of the Pillow Book can be divided into three types such as list, essay, and diary, which sometimes overlap. The Pillow Book is now considered one of the pillars of Heian vernacular court literature, but unlike the Kokinshu, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji, which had been canonized by the thirteenth century, the Pillow Book was not a required text for waka poets and was neglected in the Heian and medieval periods. But it became popular with the new commoner audience in the Tokugawa period, and it has been read for its style, humor, and interesting lists.