Cranston, Edwin A. "The Dark Path: Images of Longing in Japanese Love Poetry." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 35 (1975): 60-100.

Reviews dozens of examples of Japanese love poetry and its prevailing imagery.

Harper, T. J. "Norinaga on the Translation of Waka: His Preface to A Kokinshu Telescope." In The Distant Isle. Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Robert H. Brower, pp. 205-30, edited by Thomas Hare, Robert Borgen, and Sharalyn Orbaugh. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1996.

Reprints and discusses Motoori Norinaga's preface (much of it in Japanese) to his A Kokinshu Telescope, which deals with problems in translating Japanese poetry.

Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993, 1,280 p.

History of Japanese literature which includes an overview of the Kokinshu and a chapter on collections of waka that preceded the Kokinshu.

Konishi, Jin'ichi. A History of Japanese Literature: Volume Two: The Early Middle Ages, edited by Earl Miner, translated by Aileen Gatten. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986, 464 p.

History of Japanese literature which includes discussion and analysis of waka and the Kokinshu style.

McCullough, Helen Craig. Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968, 277 p.

Translation of Tales of Ise, a classic Japanese poetry anthology roughly contemporaneous to the Kokinshu.

Rodd, Laurel Rasplica. An introduction to Kokinshu: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, translated by Laurel Rasplica Rodd with Mary Catherine Henkenius. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 3-34.

Discusses the historical value of the work, how it came to be compiled, its rules and arrangement, and the importance of context in appreciating the poems included.