The café was hers, and so of course it was named after her. I came upon Sissy’s late one afternoon in January of 2017, when I was young and careless and in Kamakura, Japan. I had spent the day wandering the hills (my photos are of graves, statues, the daibutsu) and had climbed up to a shrine high above the Kencho-ji, where I remember glimpsing Fuji in the distance. A trail led off into the hills, and I followed it.
Sissy was somewhere back there, on the second story of a wooden house a few steps up from the street. She was an older woman, in her late seventies, not that you could tell, and she served English Breakfast tea and Pennsylvania Dutch-style cheesecake in a homey room that could once have been her kitchen. She had a cabinet full of Alison Krauss and Tim McGraw CDs, and because I was the only one there, she put one on, and we talked about her life, her love of country-and-western music. I remember that the cake tasted of lime, the tea full-bodied and steaming, but little else. I know that I soon left, visited another temple, had another cup of tea, went on to another city with its own teas and temples and cakes. Yet because I ate there, I remember Sissy’s Café.
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