ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on my embodied engagement with the materiality of the memorials (or lack thereof) of Japanese sex workers who died in British Columbia, Canada, at the turn of the twentieth century. Doing archival research and fieldwork at old cemeteries, I encounter the “ungrievability” of deaths that occurred in the underground migrant society: headstones that seem unattended, and absence of markers that make invisible their burial locations. Those are what I call “unmemorials,” memorial objects or sites that are meant for commemorating lost lives or past events but whose memorializing functions are undone or undermined due to the absence of the memorial objects, commemorators, or narratives that enable commemoration. Embodied engagement with unmemorials through performative sensory ethnography, however, makes their ungrievability sensible, and opens up a possibility to apprehend, if not remember, migrant women who lived in underground transnational spaces.
