your bridge home
The Great Epics
It arrived through two languages and several centuries, and became a single page in a Japanese anthology of instructive tales.
The Ramayana reached Japan, and almost nobody there has heard of it. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second half is the interesting one.
Every other telling in this collection is a national epic or close to it. Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Java, the Malay world and every major Indian language have a Ramayana that people know by heart.
Japan does not, and the honest thing is to say so at the start rather than inflate a trace into a tradition.
What Japan has is the far edge of the story's travel, the point where it arrived, was written down, and did not take root. That edge is worth looking at precisely because it marks the limit.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.