Review: Marie Kondo's New Show Sparks Joy
We’ve all needed a detox—whether that detox is through escaping to a quiet beach or drinking smoothies with an excess of leafy greens. In the new Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, families detox their lives by decluttering their homes and cleaning up the emotional baggage attached to their mess.
Marie Kondo is an organizing consultant and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, which has already been translated into over five languages. In it, she describes the trademarked KonMari method. Rather than cleaning by location (e.g. organizing your desk or a room), you organize your possessions by the following categories: clothing, books, papers, komono/miscellaneous items, and sentimental items. After consolidating every item of a given category in a huge pile, you hold an object in your hands and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is yes, you keep the item. If the answer is no, thank the item and discard it.
Kondo’s method is rooted in Shintoism, a traditional Japanese religion which has aspects of animism, the belief that objects are animate. She worked at a Shinto shrine for five years and its influences on her method are clear; she “wakes up” objects by tapping on them, greets the house before cleaning it, and treats all items with respect and affection.
Her kindness is extended to her clients, who have to sort through all sorts of baggage: in the first episode, a couple’s inability to clean puts a strain on their marriage, while in another, a widow sorts through her late husband’s belongings. Kondo navigates through a variety of domestic dynamics to bring not only physical but emotional comfort to their homes.
Her impact is clear: Katrina Mersier, who learns how to downsize into an apartment, exclaims, “This house is finally a home!”
The KonMari method isn’t without criticism, however. Some denounce Kondo’s lack of focus on the environmental impact throwing away heaps of trash bags can have, while others criticize her for not tackling America’s consumerist culture.
On the other side of the spectrum, organizing consultants say that her method doesn’t work because it isn’t compatible with America’s consumerist culture. Article after article misconstrues her method as excessive minimalism, with many criticizing her supposed vendetta against books. A Guardian article goes further to ridicule her method of waking up items: “Surely the way to wake up any book is to open it up and read it aloud, not tap it with fairy finger motions—but this is the woo-woo, nonsense territory we are in.”
Dismissing her Shinto tradition as fake “magic” exemplifies the racism that fuels much of her criticism. As Paper Magazine explains: “Kondo is a vector through which white people can consume ‘Asian-ness’ to assuage their insecurities about their destructive capitalist consumption and economic anxieties over the U.S.'s potentially faltering power as an imperialist superpower.”
Most of these criticisms aren’t grounded in the thinly-veiled xenophobia of the Guardian article and are rather misunderstandings. The KonMari method doesn’t ask you to discard everything, but instead prioritizes only keeping the things that “spark joy.” In the “Empty Nesters” episode, for example, the Aikyama family doesn’t throw away their room full of Christmas decorations—instead, they reorganize them into boxes. She also does address the issues with consumerism; her method gives you a new relationship to items by forcing you to evaluate the true value of a purchase.
Kondo is also flexible about her model of cleaning. “I think it’s good to have different types of organizing methods,” she told the New York Times, “because my method might not spark joy with some people, but [Peter Walsh’s] method might.”
While some clients have unresolved personal issues (the Friends and Akiyama families’ spousal tensions come to mind), Marie Kondo doesn’t claim to solve for all of life’s issues. Decluttering your home can give you a clearer mindset and most definitely a cleaner room. As long as it helps spark some joy in your life, the KonMari method is successful.
by JINHEE HEO