Before wrapping up my interview with Marie Kondo, who might well be world¡¯s foremost cleaning consultant, I promised I would put one of her de-cluttering lessons to the test prior to reviewing her book ¡°The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.¡± And so here I am in my narrow hallway, between the entrance and the living room, with a Mount Fuji-sized pile of more than 200 books.
The KonMari method boils down to this: Discard that which does not bring joy to your life. She advises being tactile, but when clearing out books she warns against dipping in and out of pages. ¡°Reading clouds your judgment.¡± I manage to toss a few, until I run my hand down the spine of my unfinished copy of ¡°Ulysses,¡± bookmarked at page 181. It pains me that I haven¡¯t finished it. Will I ever? Should I just chuck it and get on with my life as Kondo advises? James Joyce doesn¡¯t give a twopenny damn, but Marie Kondo does. Oh, bother.
If I could go back in space and time I would befriend Kondo as a child, for selfish reasons ¡ª first of which would be to please my mother.
¡°I used to clean my brother and sister¡¯s rooms,¡± Kondo explains. ¡°And I would go to friends¡¯ houses and clean their rooms, too.¡±
In a sense, what Kondo does now is no different to what she did in her formative years: tidying and thinking about tidying. Obsessively so. Except that in the meantime she has perfected the craft and become a cleaning sensation: Her latest book has sold more than a million copies in Japan; it has been translated into English, German and Taiwanese; in Japan she is a regular on TV, radio, the Web and in magazines; waiting time for a private consultation runs into months. In person, the 29-year-old Kondo is petite, no bigger than a broom, but more powerful than a Dyson vacuum cleaner.
I¡¯d expected Kondo to have come from a house where cleanliness and orderliness were paramount, but it turns out that her family were just like the O¡¯Donoghues: in turns messy and orderly. Normal.
It was the young Kondo who was the black sheep ¡ª an eternally cleaning busybody, as she outlines in her book. Her early forays in bringing order to her closet, her room and her family home brought pain instead of joy. Like most people will attest to when it comes to cleaning, the relentlessness of it defeated her. It was during one of these episodes, after despairing over her fruitless efforts, that she heard a voice.
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