Chigusa was a legendary jazz kissaten located in Noge, Yokohama. Although it has unfortunately closed, this café was known as a go-to spot for many jazz lovers. One of their regulars apparently did a pilgrimage of jazz kissatens across Japan and amassed a collection of over one hundred matchboxes from each café visited. Recently, an exhibition was held in Kamakura where, inspired by this valuable collection, photographer Yoshitaka Matsumoto arranged the matchboxes and took photographs, writer Makoto Saeki wrote the text, and Hiroshi Kamijima was in charge of graphical design.

The exhibition venue was in Hase, Kanagawa, an area that is bustling with tourists. I walked down a street filled with souvenirs and roofs overhead, and at the end I reached the staircase of a building. The staircase was bare, seeming like no one had used it in a while, and when I reached the third floor a poster caught my eye. The whole page was covered in rows of matchboxes.  In the corner of the page was a sentence that wasn’t a poem or prose.

“After reading a book about Lebanese food, somewhere in my mind I heard music that I’d never heard before.” This sentence seems somewhat nonsensical, but I had the strange feeling as if I were being invited to a place that I had never been to. The black letters and typography stood out to me too, the piece seeming like it belonged to an old magazine. The exhibition contains other photographs of matchboxes in various situations and at the side of each of them is a not-quite-prose, not-quite-poetry sentence like this. On the matchboxes themselves are the names of jazz kissatens and each act as hints to give more depth to the jazz-related stories. The photographs seem to lead you to the world indicated by the words within; each are singularly unique.

Over time, cigarettes and matches have vanished from the cafés, but these small boxes were like parcels which carry the history of people who simply loved music. There are countless stories around coffee and jazz and these are passed on through various ways or are eventually forgotten—this was something that this exhibition taught me.