It is very apparent that a lot of hard work and dedication have gone into the making of this book, the first complete translation of this truly seminal work in Japanese literary history. First of all, it was a great idea to include the original poems (written in romanji) side by side with the English translations. Then each poem is extensively annotated, with the poetic conventions utilized in each fully explained. The introduction does a great job of contextualizing the "Kokinshu" and aiding in its overall appreciation, and the appendices help anyone who wants to go into more detail do so, with an index of first lines, a biographical index of the poets, a list of secondary works, and a discussion of the variant manuscripts.
The poems themselves are graceful and elegant, sometimes melancholy and sometimes witty, usually understated in a refined way. Not too deep, usually, and it is sometimes annoyingly apparent that most of the poems were written within the hot-house atmosphere of courtier society in Kyoto in the early Heian heydays. But they never pretend to be anything else (why would they? They were at the top, after all).
Now, poetry is the hardest kind of literature to translate, especially Japanese poetry, but at times the translation here is a bit straightforward and literal, and the poem comes out sounding, well, prosaic in English. For instance, poem 1030 by Ono no Komachi is rendered "no moon lights the night/nor can I meet my lover/my blazing passion/wakens me my pounding heart/shoots flame then turns to cinders"-accurate perhaps, and yet Donald Keene's translation of the same poem in his "Anthology of Japanese Literature, Earliest Times to Mid-Nineteenth Century" while also true to the original manages at the same time to sound literary in its new language: "This night of no moon/There is no way to meet him./I rise in longing--/My breast pounds, a leaping flame,/My heart is consumed in fire" Of course, he only presents a small sampling and can afford to be picky, while this edition gives you each and every poem in the order the original editors meant them to be read. But I rather feel like this book may be more useful overall to the Japanese Literature student than to someone who just wants to savor and enjoy some good poetry.