As the ‘jolt’ and ‘surge’ described by Murakami display, satori is a momentary, transient experience. Later, describing a sublime experience which causes her to abort a suicide attempt, she recalls ‘an unbearably strong surge of the life force, beyond the bounds of logic’ (Murakami 2010: 67). After experiencing a sense of the sublime when listening to a Janacek’s Sinfionetta in a taxi, Aomame – another of the central characters in 1Q84 – describes feeling an ‘ intensely physical – and intensely personal – jolt’ (Murakami 2009: 148).

This unique characteristic of satori – its introspective and idiosyncratic nature – can be observed in literature which partakes of Zen. Thus, the truth which Zen seeks to shed light upon is known as ‘inner truth’. Unlike every other Buddhist tradition, Zen places ‘Buddha nature’ as a characteristic which is inherent and innate within each individual, merely awaiting discovery (Suzuki 1938: 56).

Therefore, the experience of satori is necessarily introspective and personal: it is first and foremost the experience of psychological unity, from which the unity of all nature is then realised. The mind which seeks to know itself, and to know the world, divides itself for this purpose, which ironically estranges it from the truth it seeks. Suzuki further reveals that the root of all dichotomic thinking lies in the birth of the ego during the formation of consciousness: the initial ‘dichotomy of subject and object’ (Suzuki 1954: 134).

Since the intellect can only serve to alienate us from the central truth of reality, Zen must be realised irrationally, purely through the individual’s deepest intuition, and thus is a form of mysticism. We mistake the structures erected to describe reality for reality itself. Ironically, the processes by which we attempt to understand and access the world actually estrange us ever further from the ‘living truth’ (Phillips 1962: xx) of existence. In striving towards satori, the ultimate goal of Zen practice, followers attempt to dissolve these artificial structures imposed by reason and thus experience reality without any corrupting intermediary:Īs Suzuki notes, Zen diagnoses the rational faculties of the mind as the cause of the dualistic mindset which characterises everyday cognition. Reality becomes then, as observed by one of the central characters of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, Tengo Kawana, an ‘infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms’ (Murakami 2009: 617). Our rational mindset estranges us from the concrete facts of experience by using the scalpel of reason to dissect the world into an endless set of dichotomies, thus fracturing our experience of reality into an artificial ‘world of particulars’ (Suzuki 1962: 419). Therefore, it views the natural cognitive functions of the conscious mind – logical analysis and rationality – as obstacles to achieving this direct experience of the world, as they precede and suppress the powers of the intuitions. To grasp the meaning of this, we must first understand that Zen places paramount significance in the basic, concrete facts of reality that present themselves to our intuitions as we experience life: the ‘suchness’ of unaffected reality. This might be defined as a transcendence of everyday cognition to achieve a direct experience of reality in its totality. The enlightenment experience takes on a very distinct and unique character in Zen, and is referred to in Japanese as satori. Central to all the varied strains of Buddhism is the concept of enlightenment.

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