The Girl with the White Rabbit

Dear John,

In ancient Greece the city was the backdrop to the theatre. The actors stood on the stage with the buildings and streets behind them to remind the audience that the story was not just a play but something real.

Today I had a strange encounter in Shinjuku Park in Tokyo. Not to be confused with the lush botanical gardens of Shinjuku Gyoen, Shinjuku Park is a dusty little slab of concrete nestled between a row of old commercial buildings and the Taiso-ji temple graveyard.

I had no business being in this part of town. But something urged me to linger around a bit longer. I found a shaded corner in the park by the playground slide and sat down to read a book on the economy of the German Weimar Republic.

There were a few people around and a young woman in a black-and-white floral frock was sitting on the platform of the slide. She had her back to me and was looking deeply into her phone. The phone’s camera was taped over and she was hurriedly writing out message after message. Her dress was elegant but creased and her shoes well worn.

Something about the woman caught my eye. She had the poise of a delicate creature that has somehow fallen into this filthy corner of the world. She turned my way and I saw a flash of her powder-white face behind long straight hair that was black like a crow’s feathers in the rain.

I noticed beneath her in the shadow under the slide was a little white rabbit on a leash. It was petrified and was taking short desperate breathes.

Some children arrived and started climbing up the slide and she gave way to them, dragging her little rabbit from out beneath the playground.

The creature was reluctant. She glanced up at me and I gave a slight wave, the kind of wave you might give at a pedestrian crossing to thank the driver for not running you over. Maybe that is a provincial thing? I don’t know if other’s do that, and to be honest I don’t know why I did it.

I might have said something to her about the rabbit looking tired. I was surprised that besides just waving back, the girl came over to me with the rabbit in her arms and dumped it right in my lap.

The little thing was breathing even faster and seemed like it might faint as I managed to secure hold of it and say some soothing words. I petted the narrow gap behind its fluffy ears and its neck.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I asked as the woman stood a measured distance away from me.

“He’s a boy. His name is Shiro-chan.”

I had to ask her to repeat the name. We were speaking in Japanese, but she had a heavy accent that I could only guess was from China.

“Do you often come here?” I asked.

“I’ve just moved to Shinjuku. I was in Ikebukuro before.”

She said she was staying in a hotel, that she was between things.

“Is he thirsty?” I asked of the white rabbit as he now held on for dear life in my lap.

I looked in my bag, but had no water left in my bottle.

“So you are planning to live in Shinjuku now?”

I think she misunderstood my question as she just replied, “Sorry, I already have plans after this,” as if I was enquiring about her availability.

I felt a bit silly as that was not my intention, and I wasn’t trying to proposition her. I tried to laugh it off by saying, “what I mean is, do you like Shinjuku?”

“Yes, I love Shinjuku and Ikebukuro very much,” she replied in a strained way, as if she was trying to keep her own story straight.

I said something stupid about preferring the ocean and the hills compared to the big city. I told her about where I’m from.

“It must be beautiful there,” she said, her eyes lighting up behind that pale white skin lightly pocked with acne.

We really only traded a few words in total. I’m trying to remember if there was any other details I could tell you. I don’t think I even asked her where she was from, as I thought it may be too rude to enquire.

I passed Shiro-chan back to her and she took him and bowed again to me with a feigned formal politeness that felt out of place. She scurried over to her bag of things dumped by the bushes and took out a few items of clothing and placed the rabbit inside before putting the clothes back on top.

I got the sudden sense that I knew her story. In this city many things happen that are beyond the wavelength of the tourist or even the local for that matter. I am cursed with eyes that see too well, eyes that see those things that take place in windowless rooms and down blind streets.

Just last night I had been wandering not far from here around Shin-Okubo with James. We had stopped in to the halal supermarket and stood around drinking chai and eating dirty samosas from some window in the wall on the main drag. Someone with a wide grin pulled up in a black van and all the people standing slapped at the windows to welcome him home. The streets were lively with all kinds of patois and motion in a way that the rest of Tokyo had mostly forgotten.

It was getting late and we passed back through the upper streets of the Shinjuku kabukicho. The area was named after a kabuki theatre that never got built but the name stuck.

We passed the Saturday-night prostitutes standing outside the love hotels and the clubs and the various legions of creatures crawling through the streets in search of flesh. I said to young James to not look to closely, for the eyes are the window the soul.

There was something about the way this Chinese girl in front of me carried herself, the way she spoke and her frantic messaging on her phone that made me think that she knew the night.

I am not in that world John, but I know about it, the way a man know’s his father’s trade, even if he does not become his apprentice. You don’t have to be born of the night to understand the shadows, even a little bit is enough to reveal the taint of darkness.

Here she was caught out in the daylight like a frazzled nocturnal creature. I wondered if maybe she was running away from something in Ikebukuro, and had ended up only a few miles away in a place just as bad, with everything she owned in that vinyl bag slumped over by the bushes.

Maybe I was reading into the fucking tealeaves too closely. But it seemed to me that she knew how to lead a man and how to dance the dance. She certainly knew how place that rabbit on my lap. But what was she doing out here behind the Buddhist graveyard?

I wondered earnestly – was she trafficked? Was she in trouble with someone? A lot of things take place in the night that normal people would flinch to know.

I could see that she was pinning her hopes of a new life and an escape on that little rabbit. Maybe that was her stage name - Shiro-chan?

Then again, how could I know for sure?

She looked exhausted but still used that accented and over-polite Japanese like the old courtesans, and gave little nods of her head and put her hands in front of her waist in a way that could only be learned in certain establishments.

I started to doubt myself. Am I not an artist with an eye for seeing the things that others ignore?

She squatted down by the bushes with her things and Shiro-chan safely packed away. She smiled with a melancholy that I cannot fully describe, stuck somewhere between the night and the day, hoping that the kids on the playground would come over and ask to see her rabbit.

Her attention returned back to her phone, busily messaging as if co-ordinating the escape. She got up to leave and slowly ambled away with her things. She gave me a little bow of her head and a smile as she passed, thanking me for something I did not do.

I sat with myself for a while after she left. Do I let the moment just drift away, or do I rush after her and call out something and look like a fool? What if she really was running away from something dangerous?

I looked down at the dust in front of the playground slide. What was it that our Lord wrote in the sand with his finger after the others accused the woman of adultery?

She was somebody’s daughter, like all of us she had dreams and ambitions and a whole life ahead of her.

But what if my intuition was wrong? What if I was totally mistaken and she was nothing of the sort? Was it my own mind that was so perverted and twisted that I saw the sale of the flesh in nothing but a smile in the park?

I hung around for a few minutes, unable to finish the page of the chapter I was on. What if I was put here to see this? Had I been guided to this little park behind the graveyard to encounter her?

I got up to walk back to the train station. Deep in my heart I thought, if only I could help her, then maybe I could help the entire world.

I had about five-thousand yen in my wallet. I could have thrown the money into her hands and said something about buying food for that poor little rabbit. I could have asked her if she needed something else.

But what if she threw it back and looked at me like any number of men who had tried paying for her body?

As I was thinking these things and walking down Shinjuku-dori I could not believe it, but I spotted that black and white dress again. She had not gone far, in fact I had gotten ahead of her somehow by going around the block. I waited at the pedestrian lights and she came up right behind me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see she was still messaging frantically on her phone.

I pretended to not notice her.

My greatest fear now was that she would think I was following her, when actually it was her who was following after me. I crossed the road, hoping that she would say something again, that she would reach out for me so that I did not have to be the one to make the move.

She was carrying her life around in that bag over her shoulder. Had she put all her hopes into that little white rabbit hidden beneath the clothes? With no one left in this world had she tasked that creature with taking on the spirit of her protector? In this cold city of millions was dear shiro-chan the only one who could comfort her from whatever darkness she had become entwined with?

Maybe I could have helped her if I had just looked up instead of being a coward. I could have followed her down the rabbit hole to tell her that there is a light, and that it is good.

I stopped in front of the Sekaido stationary store as if I was going inside. I am not usually scared to speak to people. You know how outgoing I can be, but for some reason even though I’d been fated to encounter her a second time I could only let her drift by. I knew for certain this time that she knew that I’d seen her. With a sideways glance and subtle bow of her head again she drifted past me along with the heavy crowds.

Where were they all going? From the stage of the theatre onto the stage of the city?

I watched that black and white dress all the way until it disappeared somewhere far up the road as I stood frozen to the spot like the rabbit under the playground.

In the ancient tragedies the audience watches as the actors perform in front of the silhouette of the city. Maybe I could have been a hero, maybe I could have spoken up and saved her from whatever drama was chasing after her and pulling her down that street.

But in that warm spring afternoon I was just another spectator in the back seats of the theatre.