The book titled Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojoro was something fairly new: it was a gokan, the last in a series of genres combining pictures and prose that were produced in Edo from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The genres, including akahon, kurohon, aohon, kibyoshi, and gokan, together fall under the general heading of kusa-zoshi. The category of kusa-zoshi comprises genres of fiction that were produced in Edo from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Kusa-zoshi always combined pictures and text on the same page, with the text appearing either at the top of the page, in some early akahon, or in the negative space in the pictures. Gokan occasionally included pictorial spreads with little or no writing on the one hand, or pages completely filled with writing on the other. The main texts in all forms of kusazo-shi would usually be printed in hiragana, so that the writing was legible even to the minimally educated.

The genre known as kokkeibon or comic novellas emerged in the aftermath of the Kansei Reforms. Before the reforms, the field of popular fiction had been dominated by two genres: the dialogue-based sharebon and the illustrated kibyoshi. Jippensha Ikku made his debut in popular fiction as a writer of kibyoshi under the patronage of the powerful publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo. Murataya Jirobe had organized an otoshi-banashi club in which Ikku had participated, collecting the comic tales presented at the meetings for publication in the form of hanashibon and kibyoshi. The dialogue between the protagonists that carries the story resembles the narrative technique found in sharebon, a genre in which Ikku had written extensively. Ikku drew his humorous content from a wide variety of sources, including kyogen plays and classic comic stories. The other major kokkeibon author was Shikitei Sanba. Sanba's first work in the genre was a collaboration with Santo Kyoden on a kokkeibon titled Kyogen kigo.