Keyan Bowes

I'm in Tokyo. Towers of glass and concrete, narrow roads and tangles of double-decker expressways. Manicured street trees. Eclectic conformist fashions. And a snake.

I'd gone to a small park in Hiro-o opposite a grocery store.  It was long and narrow (the park, not the grocery store), and followed a water course of some kind, a stream or rivulet ending in a little lake. I couldn't tell if it was natural or carefully designed to look that way. There was the usual population of ducks and pigeons, in a charmingly natural setting with trees and bushes and artfully placed pathways.

A woman with two small kids in tow was calling out "Snake!"

Of course I rushed to look, and there was a snake, undulating through the water. 

"Oh, a water snake," someone said.

"It came out of the bushes," the lady said, "and it went into the water." 

The snake made landfall on the other side, where a small boy stood with a fishing net. "Watch out!" called the lady, and he scampered off to find his mom.

Another little girl, out with her mother, hurried over to where the snake had landed.  So (of course) did I. The child stood on a rock and looked around until she spotted it, a long gray creature, perhaps an inch in diameter. "Where's the head?" she asked.

The head had moved on, perhaps into a hole under the bushes. We were left watching the residual snake follow. Eventually, it came to a tapered tail, and then was gone.

The kid's mother shuddered. "I've lived in Tokyo five years, and didn't know there were snakes here."

"It's amazing!" I said. "I haven't even been here five days." 

I had the sense that maybe amazing isn't the word she'd have chosen.
But maybe her daughter would.