Kawabata Yasunari's last novel Dandelions centers on a young woman, Ineko, and her battle with “somagnosia", a fictional illness which makes it appear that other people's body is disappearing. At the end of the novel, Ineko becomes unable to see her lover Kuno, suggesting that “somagnosia" is a representation of the novel's style, which combines internally and externally focalized narratives. Accordingly, this paper examines the relationship between style and the body in Dandelions. The absence of a grammatical subject, a common aspect of the Japanese language, is tacitly used to evoke a sensation of an absent subject. Dandelions then adds complexity to this sensation by its unique usage of auxiliary verbs and multiple character's voices.

　To demonstrate this, this paper first analyzes Ineko's father's death scene, in which the narrative is both internally and externally focalized on Ineko, expressing the complicated nature of her fears, which are caused by both visual and non-visual perceptions as well as memories. This paper then argues that the scene can be interpreted as an internally focalized narrative of Kuno and/or Ineko's mother, who heard about the death from Ineko. The text thus grants an independent, singular presence to certain motifs, such as the rock that Ineko's father hit as he fell. Finally, this paper asserts that Ineko's mother's perception of Ineko's skin is a good example of this particular type of presence. The relationship between the mother's words and body illustrates the complexity of bodily sensation as represented by the narrative style of Dandelions.