When an English speaking South African accented man claims he grew up in the United Emirates, works in tech, has lived in Korea, hasn’t dated since his last Filipino girlfriend, has an online teaching job he can help you earn from, offers to buy you sake four times in an hour, and hints at your visa extension via marriage, you eat your dinner plate of pasta and wagyu quickly, share your LINE contact via QR code and on the bus home, ignore the subsequent four calls he makes demanding to know when else he’ll see you at Ikeda Plaza in Hachioji, West Tokyo. Never, you should say but let the silence imply instead.

Your stop comes too quickly and on this dull Friday evening, you walk home still hungry, cold and heart broken. Inside your private room at Sunflower Hostel in Soka University, there is a lot you should do. Like the pending language class assignments but your Hiragana and Katakana chart is tucked inside the environmental science notebook where you’ve hitherto only described the physical characteristics of the Savannah biome. There is more to do, like changing the list of kujituma duties on a yellow sheet pasted on the closet door across the bed. The current one is April’s and a third of the list is unchecked. You do not mean to ignore your workload. In a few hours, you no longer can. Still, you head to the communal kitchen and from your personal cupboard, take a three tier pack of tuna cans. ‘Sea Chicken’, the label says. At your desk, inside your room and with a window open, you eat from all three cans with sweet pepper and avoid the 900ml carton box of imo shochu (sweet potato fermented spirit) on the lowest deck of a bookshelf beside the closet. On a different day you wouldn’t have but you’ve had a long day and while in bed deep in thought, after six weeks in Japan, you admit, you are tired. 

***

Tired of the short days that end in wet evenings. Tired of the night sweats from sleeping with the air conditioner on its highest setting. Tired of the drinking that leaves the body with excess water to churn out. Tired of this familiar fatigue; even this far from Nairobi, you cannot merge and enjoy yourself. You’ve stopped volunteering answers in class, stopped taking photographs and saying things on Instagram, stopped pursuing your dream of singing and recording a music video in Tokyo, stopped being in awe of yourself and your being. You are stalled and now often sit at the back; in many classes, anyone dark skinned sits within your vicinity, you do not know why. You can trace your depression to the year you turned seventeen but instead track the current bout to mid April, when the sakura blossoms outside your window began to fall and pile. On the streets, on the roofs, the river, the small pools of rainwater, on school bags, umbrellas, trains and cars. Everywhere, magic was falling and settling at your feet; outside at the convenient store and outside the shipping factory, where you and a Nigerian-rapper-schoolmate, who’d promised that you could use his home studio on his day off, spent the Saturday before last, introducing you to a part-time packing order job. 

On top of being brutal on the palms, joints and pride, the evening shift packing order job reveals some shortcomings. You have not been keen in your Japanese classes. On the first day, you struggle to communicate and watch instead, as a manager berates you in gestures and rising volume. On the second, you forget to sign in on entry and for seven hours on your feet, at an assumed 1200¥ an hour, you work for free. On the third evening, on Haijima Bridge, you cave while crying from sore limbs and an un-answered call from a lover. On your way home that day, at nearly eleven pm, you make a resolution to quit and once inside, google your way into an interview that leads you to this evening of insomnia. 

Earlier in the afternoon, at Hachioji Station, you’d mapped your way into a studio that turned out to be a rehearsal space rather than a recording or performing establishment. You were glad the receptionist had used his phone to communicate and saved you both time. Once you’d made it clear that you had beats from your producers in Kenya, the receptionist had read the translation and looked back up wide eyed but with a smile. They’d apologized because they couldn’t be of service to you. Afterwards, you’d both bowed and you’d walked out and down below to platform 02 and boarded a train to Shinjuku, Central Tokyo. As the train car filled uncomfortably at each stop, you noticed that you, too, were being noticed and that, compared to the larger prefecture, Hachioji was a small town. It was like the  towns outside Nairobi, whose centres stretch several hundred metres long on a Highway. Towns where locals have access to essential living commodities until they plan to visit state institutions for a passport, or desire better pay checks from a job that is kinder to the body. When in need, these locals catch a matatu to the grand city. And in a similar vein, you took the 2:40 pm train that, an hour later on arrival, fortunately granted you forty minutes to lose and find your way into a cleaning maid agency office on a street near Shinjuku Gyoen Park. 

As you walked up to the fourth floor of the host building, a kind of sadness overcame you as your gut stung and indicated there was no part-time job inside; no alternative to the heavy lifting, weird arching packing job at the factory near Haijima Bridge. Yet you walked into a warm office and changed your flower patterned sneakers for a pair of mud-brown indoor slippers at the genkan. After the pleasantries and introductions of bowing, konnichiwa, and exchanging names, the man across a large but solitary table asked where you were from. Kenya. Could you engage in Japanese at the conversant level? No. How long was your visa? Six months. Why, then, were you working? Wasn’t that a tourist visa? No, you were an exchange student from the University of Nairobi who, on top of your scholarship stipend, desired more than enough to move out into a crib somewhere in Utawala or Kiambu upon your return home; a balcony from which to watch a storm pour, clear or pass. Why you needed to change countries before changing counties, you do not know. 

The next hour had passed easily. The man apologized that the company could not take you on. They needed longer stays: from 12 months and on, employees whom their family-based clientele could grow accustomed to. His last piece of advice had been that, since you couldn’t communicate in Japanese, your best chance lay in a hands-on job. Somewhere where actions were preferred to words, like a packing job near Haijima Bridge. He could have informed you of this through email or a poster, why had he spent your evening? Yet somehow, you were not angry with him. You had a long way to go back home and asked instead to use the office bathroom where you’d quietly changed into a fresh pad and looked up the most direct route to the train station. 

***

Outside, you walked along a boundary of the park, shoulders low, unaware that the next time you’d be in Shinjuku, you’d be belly filled from chicken teriyaki burgers and visiting silly tourist spots like the giant animated 3D cat (who’d remind you of your own ginger cat) and the Godzilla tower. There, a brief history of the franchise is on display, but you will find the area to photographically engage with the beast’s head off limits, so you’ll settle instead for mimicking monster attacks behind a glass wall. That evening will end with you and your friend making reels with lit lanterns in the background. A few locals will bomb some takes but you will laugh it off and look forward to going to Hachioji after a meal of tilapia or jollof from a West African Restaurant minutes away from the station that only opens after 5pm. But at the moment you did not know all this and while walking, you tried your best to understand this nagging feeling you’d been thinking of naming, disappearing. In whatever way, the novelty of living abroad was vanishing, in small but persistent ways. 

In May, in replacement of the sakura, a new flower had bloomed but was ordinary, pink and multi-petaled on shrubs like bougainvilleas. After a month in Japan, you now had a routine: from hoping for summer in the cold evening; missing matatus when standing on train cars where often, you were the only African (not black, you’d learnt there was a difference); to eavesdropping on a Belgian peer who’d got a left arm sleeve tattoo worth your expected income; to increasingly adding packs of miso soup on your grocery list; to defending Africa as an outcome of irresponsible politics; to noticing how well curated your dreadlocks were and how your ankara printed accessories, bags and jewelry sat at the bottom of the closet— why had you not let them out to breathe in another city?

***

At the station, you’d mistakenly boarded the local train back to Hachioji where, at the frozen food section of a supermarket, you were startled to meet an English speaking African man whom you agreed to have dinner with because you’d changed 20$ the day before and had the yen for a plate of ramen and beef sauce. He’d gone on to spin disconnected tales of his immigrant life in London, Saudi, the UAE, Seoul and now Tokyo. You did not envy him; in some classes, you’d begun feeling like an export sample of a continent, how the man across you could so happily carry multiple cities without growing disillusioned by the loss of language to understand commuter announcements, read delivered letters, or catch friendship gossip on the elevator; or disillusioned by having to search for a second black face in a room, cafe or lecture hall, you did not know. Didn’t living in one city cause the other to gradually disappear? You’d rushed through the meal and now, in your bed, and in an attempt to induce sleep, you scroll through Tiktok. How anyone has permanently migrated from sunny East Africa without more than letters, faith and dreams as their means of communication this past millennium, you do not know…

About the Author:

Sheila Ngei is a Kenyan creative whose mediums include poetry, prose, music and editing. Her art is a means of making loud the inner conflict of a child raised to be quiet. She is the author of ‘Rebel,’ and ‘Adding Colour to Water.’ Both of which are digital poetry series published on Adventures From The Bedrooms of African Women. Currently, she is exploring political poetry through her upcoming chapbook, Silicone. Sheila is a 2024 writing fellow at Adventures From The Bedrooms of African Women, and a spring semester scholar at Soka University in Tokyo, Japan 2025. She is also the blog editor at Qwani and reads submissions sent to qwanisubmissions@gmail.com

Feature image by Indi Friday on Unsplash