The Manyoshu (8th century, various poets, trans. Ian Hideo Levy) — Japan's oldest poetry anthology includes several poems praising Mount Tsukuba, establishing its place in the Japanese literary imagination more than twelve centuries ago. The mountain appears as a symbol of endurance and beauty, celebrated above higher but less poetic peaks. Reading these poems before climbing gives the ascent a different quality — you are walking a path that Japanese poets found worth writing about before the country had a written literature.
Alex Kerr, Lost Japan (1993, translated 1996) — Kerr's account of discovering and losing traditional Japan is now a classic of Japan travel writing. He writes largely about rural Japan and the old arts, but his analysis of postwar development — the homogenising force of concrete and planning — applies directly to Tsukuba, which is in many ways the logical endpoint of that process. A science city built from scratch on farmland is exactly the kind of transformation Kerr mourns. Reading Lost Japan while visiting Tsukuba gives the city's planned tidiness a more complicated character.
Shumpei Kumon and Henry Rosovsky (eds.), The Political Economy of Japan, Vol. 3: Cultural and Social Dynamics (1992) — a dense but rewarding academic collection examining how Japanese society adapted to postwar economic change. The sections on science and technology policy, and on the creation of institutional clusters like Tsukuba's research complex, explain why this city exists and what Japan was trying to achieve by building it. Not light reading, but for anyone interested in Japan's relationship with science and modernity, it provides the intellectual context that a guidebook cannot.