The memorial service for Haruko Tsutsui was private and the family didn't want donations or anything like that. But still, they wanted to let people know that Mamasan of Waikane Store had passed.

"I didn't want her to just fizzle away," daughter Nadine Tokuzato said. "So many people knew her, people all around the world."

Generations of Windward kids grew up eating her makizushi and associating that distinct taste with good days at the beach or happy times with friends and family. Her shrimp fritters made people drive miles out into the country and folks who moved to the Mainland would pine for her chicken. But more than her cooking, it was her example that made an impression. Hard-working and stubborn but kind and fair, she made customers feel like family.

"She was so generous," Tokuzato said. "She would say 'be nice to people, always show your gratitude.'"

Tsutsui died Dec. 10. She was 98. She ran the store in Waikane from 1959 until 1972, when she asked Nadine to take over, but her tenure at the little green roadside stop extended beyond her official ownership. Tsutsui's parents owned the store before she took over, and she continued to work there with her daughter well into her 80s.

Waikane Store is unlike any store you've ever seen. It's a lunch counter without a counter, a convenience stop with few of the conveniences you'd expect. There are a couple of canned goods, coolers of chilled soda, guitar strings, surf wax, Doublemint gum, single rolls of toilet paper, an off-brand ATM and a Slush Puppy machine. No cigarettes, no liquor. Until you try the sushi or the shrimp fritters or the chicken (or the boiled peanuts or the peanut butter cookies or the hot dog musubi with spicy mustard) you might not understand the attraction. It's almost an addiction. The food tastes like home in an indescribably emotional way. You could bite into a Waikane Store shrimp fritter and just about cry happy tears.

When the bigger grocery stores opened down the road, Waikane Store changed focus from shelves lined with cans and household products to cooked food and snacks.

"This is more like a pit stop or emergency stop," Tokuzato says. "Now we depend mostly on things we make."

All of the things they make were Tsutsui's recipes and methods, and everything is made fresh. Nothing is ever held over to the next day. Tokuzato runs the store with her son Alden. Her sisters often come by to help.

Tsutsui's parents bought the store in 1929 from the Shiratori family, though it was first established in 1898 by Heong Thom as Wah Chan Store. From 1959 to 1972, it was called Tsutsui Store. Tokuzato changed the name back to Waikane Store in 1972, but many people just called it "Mamasan Store." She was always there, always busy.

She was born to issei parents Jitsuhei and Yuku Moriwaki in Mokule'ia, but when she was 4, she was taken back to Japan to be raised by her grandmother. It was her parents' intent to return to Japan, but they ended up staying in Hawai'i. She returned to O'ahu at 17 to work on her parents' farm. She married Chiyoki Tsutsui three years later, and though she was Hawai'i-born, lost her citizenship by wedding an issei. Years later, she took citizenship classes and was naturalized in 1960.

Her husband worked at the Waialua Plantation, but in 1944, her parents asked them to move into a house behind Waikane Store and they began to farm. In 1959, her parents asked her to buy the store from them, so at 49, she took on the new set of responsibilities running a business. Her husband died in 1969.

"She knew a little English, and didn't know the names of products, so the children would point and say, 'That one, Mamasan, the green gum' meaning Doublemint," Tokuzato reminisced in a biography she prepared for her mother's memorial.

Customers were protective of Mamasan, giving a wary eye to whichever relative was filling in for her if she was away on a trip. Tourists told friends about the sweet little store they discovered in the country and about the little lady who made all the food.

"Once an airplane steward told us he was on his way to Amsterdam, when some passengers learned that he was planning to come to Hawai'i for a vacation," the family wrote in the biography. "They told him to come to Waikane Store. When Haruko picked the pen up and started adding the purchases without a calculator, he got excited and exclaimed, 'They told me you would use pen and paper. Your name is Mamasan!' "

Tsutsui continued to help Tokuzato in the store for the next two decades, and the last several years, kept working in her extensive garden on the grounds of her house in the back of the store.

"She used to sit here and count her pears," Tokuzato says, pointing to the wooden steps leading from the house to the yard, and then to the flowering Bartlett pear tree, something you don't see very often in Hawai'i. "She would count 70 pears," Tokuzato says.

She had a way with plants, coaxing them into full potential, doing things like creating a hybrid hibiscus bush that bloomed single and double orange and yellow flowers. Since her stroke last March, her carefully tended garden behind the store has grown a bit wild, and a peacock has recently taken up residence among the flowers and fruit trees.

Haruko Tsutsui is survived by children Masaaki, Setsuo Ralph, Yukiko Nitahara, Yvonne Tashiro, Makiko Gishi, and Nadine Tokuzato; 31 grandchildren; 52 great-grandchildren; 24 great-great-grandchildren; and one great-great-great-grandson.

Her recipes, and her generous, industrious example, are faithfully followed at Waikane Store Tuesday through Friday 9:30 to 5 and Saturdays, 9:30 to 3.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.