Her best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was a global phenomenon, changing our thinking about material excess. Lifestyle and de-cluttering star Marie Kondo tells the BBC about the KonMari method, magic, minimalism and how being a Shinto maiden shaped her.
It was October 2014 when the buzz started, online and in print – a whisper that was about to go viral. There was a Japanese author, a diminutive woman with a quiet, charismatic presence. And her debut book, intriguingly, was about one of the most mundane subjects imaginable: tidying up.
No one would have guessed the excitement and serious discussion that book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, would go on to inspire – and the global fame it would bring its author, Marie Kondo. It would stay on The New York Times bestseller list for 150 weeks, has since been translated into 44 languages, and sold more than 14 million copies (in the same sales ballpark as Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom).
Kondo is a big believer in using her life story to sell her philosophy. She relates how, having read The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi, a bestseller in Japan, she began throwing things away – and it was seeing this transformation that led to her cardinal rule: tidying must be done as a "special event", just once and to perfection. "If you tidy in one go, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mindset," she writes.
"Tidying by category" is another rule, to be done in strict order of clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items. She used to advise heaping all your clothes in a pile, but now allows subcategories (eg, jackets, trousers, etc). Her tone is firm but light and playful: making tidying fun is half the battle. She never tires of relating the dramatic event that birthed her "spark joy" rule. It resulted from a tidying session so intense that it made her faint. Coming to, she heard a voice say "look at the items carefully and closely". Instead of looking for reasons to discard an item, you should find reasons to keep them, she realized. "Deciding what to keep on the basis of what sparks joy in your heart," she writes, "is the most important step in tidying."
That energy is evident on a video call with the BBC. Kondo is smiling, polite, eager to understand and respond to questions, speaking fast in Japanese, translated into English by her interpreter. Her home is neat, minimally furnished with a white curtain and a few long-leaved plants. She wears an ivory jumper, her glossy hair is neatly bobbed and as always she uses her hands expressively.
Fifteen years on, what does she feel about the impact The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has had? "The level of success [it had] blew my mind… I had always believed in the power and strength of tidying," she says, "but when my book became such an international sensation, of course I was very shocked, and surprised that my ideas would resonate with so many people on such a large scale."
She has received up to 1,000 emails a day in the past with readers' photos of homes they have "kondoed". It's gratifying, she says, and the change is permanent: "My clients never go back to the mess, because they have been transformed into an organised person." It also includes cases where "someone has come to realize, 'wow, this is a relationship that means a lot to me, and I want to dedicate more time to it'".
On her website she writes about tuning into the "energy" of things; when you feel a "tingle" or a "ching" (a noise she makes), that means you can keep an item. Or she is following rituals, such as tapping a tuning fork on a crystal, and waving it around her head to absorb its "sonic vibrations [that] have a subtle healing power that helps me to reset".
"There are three pillars of KonMari I can link back to being a shrine maiden," she says. "First is purifying things – a shrine must be kept pure, which is similar to tidying up. Second is gratitude – at a shrine you give thanks for what you have been given." She thanks a space before working on it, and suggests giving gratitude to objects, be it a computer, or your shoes. "The third pillar is reflection; being at a shrine gives you space to breathe and listen to your thoughts."
"It dawned on me I didn't have the same time to tidy up perfectly as I used to – you can't always maintain the perfect space at any given moment," she says. But she had found truth in the aphorism that your children teach you how to live: "I asked myself, 'What does spark joy in my life?', and my answer was right in front of me."