How do you tidy up before Marie Kondo arrives at your house? The 38-year-old queen of domestic serenity has been bossing chaos since 2011, when she published The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Then in 2016 came Spark Joy, an illustrated follow-up, and pretty soon the entire world – I’m not exaggerating – was familiar with her principles: separate your belongings into categories: clothes, books, papers, miscellany, sentimental items. Go through, in that order, and pick up each item, hold it in your hands, ask yourself if it sparks joy. If it doesn’t, discard it. “For the things that you decide to let go, you thank it for having sparked joy in the past,” she tells me later, through an interpreter. “Out loud?” I ask, appalled. “Silently is fine.” All that remains is to decide where to put your joy-sparking items.
Pause for a second, here: I have been scoffing at the notion of thanking objects since I read Kondo’s handbag advice (you’re meant to thank it at the end of each day), but that is cloth-eared. The Shinto religion – Kondo isn’t incredibly observant, but was a miko (shrine maiden) in her late teens – is animist, and holds that some inanimate objects can gain a soul after 100 years of service. So there is nothing ridiculous about feeling gratitude to a thing; ridiculous is clinging on to a thing that plainly doesn’t have a soul.
Kondo is only going to tidy my desk, so my whole-house tidy was precautionary and a little bit chastening. There was an empty beer bottle on my bedside table, right there, where regular people keep books. Downstairs, there was a book face down in some sauce. Never mind untidy, why am I so disgusting? She arrived at my house as – no offence, everyone – the most perfect person who has ever set foot in it: radiant with calm, fine-boned and beautiful like a statue, collected, curious. As a result of her Netflix series Sparking Joy (in 2021) and Tidying Up (2019), she has become an obsession with my nieces, and they are here, too, pretending to be yet more of my children. I’m affecting to have five children, three of whom are 15 and look nothing alike. While I’m wondering what my answer will be, should she ask me whether all these teenagers spark joy (some of them, some of the time), the younger niece proffers an origami flower she has made. It is an exquisite moment, a disciple of tidiness meeting her prophet, bonding wordlessly over this perfect, neat thing. It made it into Kondo’s handbag, so it must have sparked joy; either that, or there is a hard edge where manners meet tidy-rules, and manners win. She doesn’t say that in the books, and that’s half my stuff: things that I can’t throw away because someone gave them to me. OK, a 10th of my stuff.
How did this happen? Kondo grew up in Tokyo in a regular family, with two siblings. “My parents are what I would call ordinary people. They’re not particularly tidy. They’re not particularly untidy,” she says. Her singular passion for organising was manifest by her earliest schooldays, and by the time she got to Tokyo Woman’s Christian University to study sociology, she was regularly introducing her friends to her “KonMari” method. At 19, strangers were asking her to tidy for them, and she started her organising consultancy business – an empire was in the making.
Her new book, Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home, ventures into new realms: gardens, fermentation, living spaces that “foster conversation”. This gestalt approach reflects, I think, the fact that once people have adopted her tidying method, it is so life-changing that they want her to tell them how to do everything. She has come straight from a book launch in central London, where people in the audience were describing major life changes that started when they adopted the KonMari method, and this, to Kondo, makes perfect sense: “Through tidying, you would have to repeat the process of finding things that spark joy or not. And through doing that many, many times, you will improve your sense of finding out what sparks joy in your life and what doesn’t. That can be applied not just to objects but also to people. Gradually, people would start changing what kind of person they want to date, or what kind of job they think might spark joy. That’s how life can change.”
So, there’s a problem with my desk: it will take more than two hours. Can we do my husband’s desk instead? Sure, the worst that could happen would be that I throw away his mini-USB. Since clothes are not typically found on desks, we start on books. She places in my hands Enabling Collaboration – Achieving Success Through Strategic Alliances and Partnerships, and asks, does it spark joy? This question is so absurd that I can hardly stop laughing. Oh my God, it was boring. Five minutes in, we have discarded all his books, except, realistically, I don’t think we can.
“Maybe we have to do your desk,” Kondo says. It turns out that I’m going to disrupt her system, because there are clothes on my desk, but we don’t find that out until much, much later. Deliciously, she calls them “textiles”; they can’t be clothes, if they were, we’d have done them first, and what kind of maniac keeps their friend’s scarf, a spare school tie and a T-shirt underneath 17 years of bank statements?
Kondo’s thesis, at the end of her degree, was titled “Tidying up as seen from the perspective of gender”, which argued that while tidying shouldn’t be seen as the preserve of women, they did seem to have a closer connection with their physical surroundings. The subject is unavoidable: tidiness as a component of femininity, allied to restraint, order, the suppression of base impulse, is half the reason I won’t tidy. The tide of Kondo’s career, though, has made her think that maybe this isn’t a girl-thing: “When it comes to just possessing things and thinking about what you want to possess, I think it’s the same for any gender. I keep hearing people who say they listened to my method, they tidied and their lives changed, many men as well. I just happen to be a woman, that’s all. Although it’s true that among my readers, there are more women.”
She married Takumi Kawahara, who is now CEO of KonMari Media, in 2012. In Kurashi at Home, she takes on the dilemma, “Help, my partner’s messy!” (the answer, by the way, is to be so tidy yourself that it encourages them to change), but this relates in no way to her marriage. “Perhaps my husband is tidier than me. I love my job of telling people the value of tidying, however I wouldn’t say my house is perfectly tidy,” she says.
“Once you start tidying,” she tells me, back at my desk, “your hurdle for throwing things away is not as high as you think.” The books were incredibly easy (are you ever going to read a Charles Cumming spy novel twice?), the paperwork straightforward (my bin is overflowing). We are on to miscellany: a toothbrush; nine pairs of sunglasses; a stick; a wrap you would put round your knuckles before a boxing glove, but only one of them, and anyway, when did I last box? It’s so completely random, they belong in an Art Garfunkel song. Generally, she just very gently nudges stuff towards me but, at one point, she drops into my palm, with her ee cummings-small hands, three loose cheese-and-onion crisps and a tooth. “Do these spark joy?” I have no idea how, but she and the interpreter manage to remain deadpan. In fact, the tooth was my daughter’s, so has a sentiment attached, but it’s not joy; it didn’t come out on its own, but had to be wrenched from her tiny head, and all the way home, she said: “I wish that hadn’t happened.” What I’m holding on to is an incredibly horrible memory. I stare at it for ages. “It’s better with sentimental items to put them in a box and deal with all of them together,” she says. Imagine that – everything in your life with a memory attached, in one place, having to decide which you want to keep, and where you are going to keep it. How long would that take? What state would you be in at the end of it? Would you have a display cabinet, for teeth?
Kondo had her first daughter in 2015, her second the next year, and has always said that it’s perfectly possible to be tidy and have children – you just have to incorporate them into your routine, make tidying up into a game. Then, last year, she had her third child, a son. “After the first, slowly, gradually, I returned to order, and after the second, it was faster; after the third, I just thought, tidying has become impossible. My daily life is so chaotic. So, of course, I try as much as possible. But I don’t have time and children just keep undoing all my tidying. So my strength is I just know that I know how to tidy, so I’ve positively given up on the tidiness. I decided this is a time in my life that I spend with my children.”
“I’m sure I’ve said before that, even with children, I can still tidy,” she carries on. “However, I feel that people can change, and we’re allowed to change.” “Lady,” I want to say, “you don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’ve still got a tooth in my pocket that I can’t work out what to do with.” But I decide on balance that this would put too much pressure on the interpreter.
Some general rules for a peaceful desk: never stack books or notebooks spine-sideways, always vertically. It’s much more pleasing to the eye. When you open a drawer, you should be able to see everything in it. Rootling is the enemy of order. There should be nothing on the surface that you’re not working on in that moment except, at a pinch, personal care items (lip balm, eye drops) and one ornament. My desk itself has sentimental value: it was one of the hotly contested items in my parents’ separation circa 1976, and somehow my dad got it, which was weird as it was originally a present from my mum’s friend. Then, when I bought my first flat a quarter-century later, he gave it to me, just to annoy my mother. I really feel like all that long-range animus and constant mischief has informed who I am, in a good way. Shinto-wise, I think it probably does have a soul, but I haven’t seen the surface of it in years, maybe never. I love it like this. Three whole days have passed and it’s still completely clear. The floor’s a bomb site.
The Japanese tsunami of March 2011 changed the context of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. There was speculation afterwards that the magnitude of that loss – more than 20,000 people, 120,000 buildings, a nuclear disaster – and the emotional wrench of having to rebuild in its wake made people think more searchingly about stuff: what does any of it matter? What are you clinging on to?
But that success was replicated more or less everywhere her books were translated: even before the Netflix series boosted her profile, Kondo’s books were bestsellers in Europe and the US. “Actually, the reaction has been really unanimous, to my surprise,” she says. “I used to think that American houses are so big that maybe they don’t have this issue of having to tidy your house. But as soon as I went to America, I realised people have the same struggle: having too many things and not having enough storage and having guilt in throwing things away.” She and her family split their time, now, between Tokyo and California. There are cosmetic cultural differences – in Japan, books are cheaper, more like magazines, so people are chiller about throwing them out – but fundamentally we’re all the same, under the skin; we would all like to see the surface of our desk. Some of us just don’t know it yet.
“What I do is really fun,” she says, “I have lots of different positive feelings from it. Fun is the first thing. Also, there’s the reassurance and the happiness, when I see things are where they should be.” Nothing fazes her, least of all chaos. “I have a joy in seeing room for tidying.” I will probably never completely understand, but I’m happy she’s happy.
Kurashi at Home: How to Organise Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life, by Marie Kondo, is out now (Bluebird, £25)
