Male-male love epistles were thus part of what Laura Moretti has recently described as Japan's seventeenth-century "letteracy"— the complex set of skills involved in letter writing that required more than mere literacy—that readers could navigate with the support of a flurry of popular letter-writing manuals. Romantic works of narrative fiction penned in epistolary form and specialist love-letter manuals served as practical style guides for male-female romantic correspondence in the seventeenth century, often taking the court literature of the classical age, in particular The Tale of Genji, as their model to emulate.

By the late Edo period, more risqué compendia of love letters provided not only correspondence samples for every conceivable type of partner and situation— from lady-in-waiting to sex worker and from first confession to break-up—but typically also included head texts that provided more explicit instructions for intimacy in the bedroom. The subject of male-male romantic "letteracy," however, remains to be addressed by researchers, despite the fact that it poses intriguing questions in view of the gendered registers of letter writing.

As the etiquette guide stressed, classical poetry (furuuta) and prose tales (monogatari) were the ultimate idiom of lovers, while the formal epistolary style (sōrōbun) that typified other forms of male correspondence risked putting off any "wakashū with a heart." Instead of the "stiff" (katai) formulaic phrases of the Sino-Japanese register, elegant and "gentle" Japanese words (Yamato kotoba) were to be preferred, although their excessive use was to be avoided for fear of straying into an all-too feminine style.

It is therefore not surprising that Genta in the Yale manuscript receives a poem in a love letter from his ardent admirer (and future murderer), although in this case it is an original, personalized verse that incorporates a word play on Genta's name, rather than a staple from the classical canon. As we have seen from their inclusion in early modern guidebooks on male-male courtship, waka were by no means the exclusive domain of heterosexual love, and the fact that by the seventeenth century a scholar of classical literature such as Kitamura Kigin 北村季吟 (1625–1705) was able to create a poetic tradition of male same-sex love demonstrates the malleability of various gendered readings of Heian poetry. The gender of the object of desire in classical poetry was clearly flexible in the early Edo period, so that a poem such as Kanemori's cited above might as easily appear in a male love letter to a youth as in an eighteenth-century educational textbook for women or as part of an erotic print depicting male-female desire.

Responding to letters required both tact and tactics on the part of the wakashū. The nanshoku guide Saiseiki 催情記 (ca. 1624–1644)  provided instructions based on how the younger partner felt about the sender. If they had no interest in a relationship, then there was no need to reply. But if their admirer failed to take the hint even after their first three letters had been ignored and persisted in pleading "at least let me see your handwriting, so that I shall have something to worship," then it was time for a perfunctory but strongly worded response designed to quash their hopes once and for all (see the translation). If the wakashū shared the same feelings as the writer, the manual still advised against sending an immediate reply, but recommended prudently taking time to evaluate the suitor and the sincerity of his feelings. Nanshoku masukagami, by contrast, proposed a more compassionate approach when rejecting unwanted suitors, exhorting the wakashū to be kind and suggesting excuses such as being in a committed relationship with an "older brother" or having taken a vow not to take a lover. Genta employs some of these strategies in response to Nagai Seizaemon's constant visits and his love letter: he writes a non-committal response and later tries to fob Nagai off under the pretext of having several other suitors. In Genta's case, however, these tactics prove supremely unsuccessful, merely enraging the jilted lover and paving the way for the violent denouement.

Formal oaths were usually inscribed on a religious talisman in ink or blood and invoked a variety of gods (hence the request in the manuscript that Genta write an "oath to the gods") based on the premise that divine punishment would befall those who broke their pledge.

In some cases, however, proof of one's love could take more extreme forms than written vows and included severing a finger, ripping out a fingernail, and cutting oneself on the thigh or upper arm with a blade. Some nanshoku guides even provided detailed advice on how best to carry out such actions without crippling oneself for life. Similar "tokens of love" were also recommended for courtesans in guidebooks to the licensed quarters, demonstrating once again the overlap that had come to exist in both male-male and male-female modes of courtship contexts by the late seventeenth century. Despite the inclusion of such grisly practices, however, ideal relationships as described in nanshoku etiquette books were refined, elegant pursuits, which were expected to be conducted—and also ended—in a civilized manner. While sharing the emotional style and courtship practices of such texts, Genta's story was thus ultimately far removed from such models of civility in its violent outcome.