The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
| Marie Kondo | |
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Kondo in 2015
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| Born | Circa 1985 |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Occupation | Organizing consultant and author |
| Years active | 1997 to present |
| Known for | KonMari method |
| Notable work | The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing |
| Website | konmari |
Marie Kondo (近藤 麻理恵 Kondō Marie, born circa 1985) is a Japanese organizing consultant and author.
She has written four books on organizing, which have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated from Japanese into languages including Korean, Chinese, French, German, and English. In particular, her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) has been published in more than 30 countries. It was a bestseller in Japan and in Europe, and was published in the United States in 2014.
She was listed as one of Time's "100 most influential people" in 2015.
Kondo says that she has been interested in organizing since childhood. In junior school, Kondo ran into the classroom to tidy up bookshelves while her classmates were playing in physical education class. Whenever there was nomination for class roles, she did not seek to be the class representative or the pet feeder. Instead, she yearned to be the bookshelf manager to continue to tidy up books. She said she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day, "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."
She spent five years as an attendant maiden at a Shinto shrine. She founded her organizing consulting business when she was 19 and a sociology student at Tokyo Woman's Christian University.
Kondo's method of organizing is known as the KonMari method, and consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy" (tokimeku, the word in Japanese, means "flutter, throb, palpitate"), and choosing a place for everything from then on.
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