In general, war tales describe historical warfare and the lives of warriors and the people close to them. The main characters are heroic and often take on the hyperbolic dimensions. The earliest of the medieval war tales are the group describing the causes and effects of the Genpei War: Hogen monogatari, Heiji monogatari, and Heike monogatari. Together with Jokyuki, these tales concerning the formative years of the Kamakura period were sometimes considered as a four-part set that together narrates the consolidation of power under the Kamakura shogunate. Scholars often pair Hogen monogatari and Heiji monogatari because of their connected storylines, characters, and shared compositional and reception histories. Both tales consist of three chapters, and both seem to have been written after the Genpei War, as they open with statements pointing toward a shared endpoint and anticipate the events of the 1170s and 1180s as the destination of their narratives.

The three most frequently commented texts of the classical literary canon are Kokin wakashu or KKS, Ise monogatari or The Tales of Ise, and Genji monogatari or The Tale of Genji. Imperial waka anthologies for the three centuries after KKS were ignored by commentators until the eighteenth century; the same is true for The Tale of Sagoromo, a narrative fiction the waka of which were considered comparable to those of Genji in late Heian and Kamakura times. One factor must be that KKS and Tales of Ise themselves incorporate distinctive forms of commentary. KKS can be defined in fact as a corpus of cited poems framed by two kinds of editorial comments and two "prefaces". The earliest extant commentaries on The Tales of Ise inclined toward extravagant allegoresis incorporating strains of Esoteric and Tantric Buddhism and Shinto that flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, often intertwined with heterodox KKS commentaries of a similar bent.

Among the many literary diaries of the medieval period, eight stand out as works by women: Tamakiwaru, Kenreimonin Ukyo no Daibu shu, Ben no Naishi nikki, Utatane, Izayoi nikki, Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki, Towazugatari, and Takemukigaki. Poetry also played a prominent role in women's works as a mode of a communication, a narrative strategy, and way of binding the author's life with those of other famous figures, whether historical or fictional. Poetic inspiration was one of the many motivations for medieval travel and the development of travel diaries was closely linked to the establishment of set literary routes and sites a writer was expected to visit. Medieval diaries by women have traditionally been represented as lesser examples of the court literature that flourished during the Heian era. The brief summaries that follow show the diversity of female-authored works from the Kamakura and Northern and Southern Court periods and highlight some of the many reasons these works deserve greater study.

Much longer fiction survives from Imperial Princess Baishi's day, and one of her attendants, is credited with Sagoromo monogatari, dated to sometime between 1069 and 1086. The influence of Genji is discernible on the very first page of Sagoromo, as the eponymous hero alludes to a poem by Genji himself. In the postscript to his copy of the Sarashina nikki, the famous poet Fujiwara no Teika records the attribution of four monogatari to the diary's author, two of which are still extant: Yoru no Nezame and Hamamatsu Chunagon monogatari. The final monogatari extant from the Heian period is Torikaebaya monogatari. Critical consideration of the monogatari genre reached its second peak in 1271 with the completion of the Fuyo wakashu, an imperial anthology-like collection of over two hundred poems drawn exclusively from monogatari, in twenty books. The collection provides evidence that it was in fact in the Kamakura period that most monogatari were produced.