By the time the Yale manuscript appeared in the early eighteenth century, a commercialized popular culture had developed around "male love" (nanshoku), or the "way of the youth" (shudō), in the metropolises, fueled by a booming publishing industry, male prostitution, and the popularity of kabuki theaters with their casts of all-male actors. As such, the subject was openly thematized in commercial print, with various guidebooks detailing the intricacies of male-male love, from advice on writing love letters to the mundane practicalities of plucking nose hair. There were also fictional disputes published about the superiority of "male love" over love for women, actor evaluation books that reviewed the physical beauty of young men on the kabuki stage, and collections of love stories that featured monks, actors, and loyal samurai youths, as well as explicit shunga books with illustrations of male couples. Legal pronouncements at the time primarily sought to regulate the potential fallout from intense male-male bonds rather than targeting the practice itself, while medical discourses made little objection on health grounds and remained largely silent on the subject. Although not completely unchecked, the culture of nanshoku was thus neither illicit nor "secret" and circulated relatively freely in early modern commercial print.

Nanshoku had already played an important part in Japanese culture and literature prior to the Edo period and had long been associated with religious and political elites, particularly the samurai class and the Buddhist clergy. Medieval Buddhist monasteries housed a number of adolescent acolytes (chigo), who studied and served under senior monks, fulfilled ceremonial and ritual functions, and also acted as sexual and romantic partners for their superiors. Some Buddhist lineages even transmitted consecration rituals (chigo kanjō) that involved the sexual penetration of such deified adolescents. Medieval love stories between acolytes and monks (chigo monogatari) extolled the benefits of such relationships for religious awakening, while poetry collections recorded verses by monks longing for their beloved chigo.

By the early Edo period, the Buddhist clergy were routinely depicted as lovers of boys in humorous tales and other popular fiction. Against this backdrop, the Yale manuscript's choice of a Buddhist deity as narrator, as well as a Buddhist monk as the (purported) compiler who laments Genta's death, may not be coincidental—although clerics do not feature among Genta's many lovers and admirers.

What nanshoku shared across these various social settings was the preference for a wakashū or adolescent youth—be they acolyte, page, young samurai, actor, or male prostitute—to act as the younger partner for an adult male (nenja). Genta is clearly represented as a wakashū in the Yale manuscript's illustrations, sporting the maegami hairstyle with forelocks that was typical of youths who had not yet undergone their coming-of-age ceremony. Genta, who we learn at the time of his murder had been preparing for his preliminary coming-of-age ceremony (hangenpuku), becomes the primary object of the adoring, adult male gaze in the story—not only that of his numerous lovers but also of the narrator Jizō and the anonymous monk-compiler. He stands at the center of the narrative, which turns a real-life murder into the tragic tale of its young victim rather than that of the murderer, Nagai. As such, Genta is presented in a somewhat idealized and appealing light as a highly talented adolescent samurai of good character, a feature the manuscript shares with wakashū-centric literary texts. Apart from a single love poem lauding his "peerless beauty," however, virtually no reference is made to his physical attributes, and the manuscript largely forgoes lyrical and literary devices in order to strike a more factual-sounding tone.

While such official regulations naturally focus primarily on the darker, more violent side of nanshoku, it is hard to ignore the parallels with Genta's tale. "Cliques" of lovers and enemies are formed and loyalties are reshuffled based on Genta's intimate bonds with other men, which are openly brokered by friends, neighbors, and acquaintances acting as matchmakers. Intimate relations quickly sour and become a source of jealousy and discord within the neighborhood circle of mid-ranking retainers, ultimately becoming "a matter of life and death" for Genta.

The progression of Genta's nanshoku relationships, in fact, closely matches that of shudō pronouncements in domain legislation. Viewed together, these local decrees and the Yale manuscript evoke a lively, communally condoned yet potentially violent local culture of samurai male-male love. Within this context, Genta's case may well have been precisely one of the nanshoku-related incidents that the authorities were anxious to prevent.

The only other detailed account of a comparable murder case comes from an unofficial source, a manuscript miscellany of local incidents and anecdotes, and concerns the 1767 case of Hirabayashi Rikisuke 平林力助 (24) and Nakazato Heiji 中里兵次 (13), who had "sworn an oath of brotherhood" sealed in blood. Jealous of their close relationship, other youths from the neighborhood approached Heiji's father and threatened to ostracize his son if they were not allowed access to him. Heiji's father pleaded with Rikisuke to release his son from their commitment, but when this request was angrily rejected, Heiji's parents attempted to keep the two apart. The situation escalated when Rikisuke discovered that Heiji had deceived him and he was ridiculed by his peers for the boy's waning affections. That evening he visited Heiji's house, fatally stabbed him, and then committed suicide by cutting his own throat. The subsequent investigation by the domain authorities extended to the group of youths who had pressured Heiji's father for nanshoku relations with his son, but it ultimately concluded that Rikisuke had murdered Heiji "in a bout of insanity."