Marie Kondo is right on time, of course. It’s 7.30pm, but lunchtime in LA where the Japanese tidying expert now lives, and when she pops up on my laptop screen, she is startlingly, preternaturally beautiful. Perfectly composed and self-contained, she seems otherworldly, not least in comparison to the civilians who share the screen: me in one corner, her translator (Marie Iida, familiar to anyone who watched smash-hit 2019 Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo) in another. Kondo has evidently already trained her immaculately manicured hands not to touch her face, allowing them to flutter only occasionally before the camera to emphasise a point or show me the rose-gold MacBook Air and single notebook on her almost empty desk. This is my first interview since the start of the coronavirus pandemic: Kondo was the one who insisted on video rather than face-to-face, presciently so; when the interview was first arranged, we weren’t nearly as far down the path to panic and no one was contemplating a full lockdown. But arguably, Kondo was built for this kind of crisis. Not for her family – husband, Takumi, and two daughters, aged three and four – a descent into hoarding and chaotic self-isolation. Her mission, ever since she discovered a talent for organising aged just five, has been about creating calm through tidiness, keeping only those things that ‘spark joy’, as her catchphrase goes.

Marie first discovered she had a talent for organising aged five Credit : Keith Ng

As anyone who even flirted with the KonMari Method outlined in her first book, 2011’s 10-million-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, can attest, purging your possessions and carefully curating what’s left really does make you feel happier, lighter and calmer. And now, more than ever, she’s an evangelist for its powers. ‘There is so much anxiety in the world right now, and I do feel like there’s a need for self-reflection, to ponder that question of how do you want to live your life,’ she says through her translator, her soft, high voice soothingly musical. ‘One solution is to tidy your home, because that process is discovering what’s most important to you. It allows you to control the environment you are able to control, so it does offer a solution in that sense. ‘It’s a process of clarifying what’s going on inside you as well, and the more you are in touch with that, the calmer your viewpoint of the world. Even if you feel society is mired in anxiety and restlessness, this makes you see what’s in front of you, and remember the things and people you do have, to foster a feeling of gratitude for them. That has a calming effect on your heart.’

Somewhat ironically, the book we’re here to talk about today is about a place few of us are able to be right now: our workplaces. Joy at Work is the fourth spin-off of her original bestseller (so her fifth book in English, but her ninth in Japanese), following, most recently, one for teens: The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up. This book, co-written with professor of management Scott Sonenshein, covers how to organise your workspace and also tackles digital decluttering – how to tidy your smartphone, computer, even your calendar, of which more later. But while most are unable to work in our offices, many are still working from home, where clearing a space – physically and psychologically – that allows for concentration if you’re all cramped together 24/7 is more important than ever.

Self-isolation doesn't seem so bad when you're surrounded by interiors like these Credit : Instagram @enter_my_attic @rebeccaprus

While she’s mostly associated with tidying homes, from the off she was also tidying workspaces – meeting clients at their offices hours before the work day began to help them sort through mountains of paper (early mornings, she says, are best for tidying offices). She bluntly demolishes the kind of theories that might get in the way of a clear-out: such as that mess somehow equals creativity, and neatness is boring. Much of what she advises in the book – which, of course, was written long before the current crisis – can equally apply to a home office. She has three hard rules about desk storage, for instance: Rule 1: designate a place for each item and store by category.

Rule 2: use boxes and store things upright – this will help maximise space.

Rule 3: don’t store anything on top of your desk. ‘Your desktop is a work surface, not a storage cupboard,’ she writes. ‘The only things on your desk should be whatever you need right now for the project you are working on.’ On this last one, she’s a little flexible: she allows you to keep pens in a stand on your desk rather than in a drawer, and you’re also allowed an ornament or a potted plant. When we speak, she has a bunch of pink flowers in a vase; Takumi has a wooden ‘zen egg’ on his desk: ‘It has a calming effect, when you’re pondering something,’ she says.

‘Clearing a space that allows for concentration is more important than ever’ Credit : Instagram @mariekondo

There’s a daily ritual for the post-corona germ-phobe too, which she used to do when she worked in an office: when you arrive each morning, wipe the top of your desk, your computer, mouse, keyboard and phone, and on Mondays, do a deeper clean – the legs of your chair, the cables under the desk. ‘It sounds like a lot of work, but altogether it took less than a minute,’ she writes. ‘Yet it made my desk area look so neat and tidy, it seemed like a world apart. The atmosphere lightened, and it was easier to get down to work. While my hands were busy cleaning, I could empty my mind and make this part of my day into a little meditation, a ritual that allowed me to switch into working mode.’ There’s a degree of anxiety in letting Marie Kondo visit your home, even without her physically there, so in the hours before our scheduled call, I find myself trying to tidy up, but it’s a futile gesture. A few months earlier, I would have been proudly showing off my neatly labelled boxes on the shelves, because I am a Konvert, albeit a lapsed one. I’ve sorted beauty products, clothes and electrical cables according to the world-famous KonMari Method: dump everything into an enormous pile, sort by category and only keep what truly sparks joy. As I sheepishly point to the shelves behind me and start to explain how I once ‘Kondo’d’ them, I catch a glimpse of the look on her face: the shutters have come down, stress momentarily flashing across it. ‘That’s great to hear,’ she says, when I tell her that her new book arrived just at the right time, but even via the translator I can hear it’s an automatic response. What must it be like to be Kondo: instantly recognisable, continually accosted by fans eager to show her pictures of their Kondo’d cupboards and drawers, hungry for her approval? ‘It really depends on the person,’ she says, before insisting, somewhat hollowly, that ‘what makes me particularly happy is when people share that they have finished tidying by my method, and share with me how their life has changed afterwards’. To have your name become a verb must be an odd feeling. She nods. ‘It feels very strange. To know it has permeated so much around the world is very surprising.’

Kondo with her two young daughters Credit : KonMari Inc

No one could have predicted the phenomenon she would become. No one, that is, except editor Tomohiro Takahashi, who, according to an article in the Japanese publishing journal Shin-bunka, bought the book before she’d even written a word, after her proposal won first prize in a publishing training course called ‘How to write bestsellers that will be loved for 10 years’. ‘She’s going to be on TV and become famous,’ he reportedly told Shin-bunka. ‘I felt a mysterious energy around her that I had never experienced around other people.’ According to the journal, he worked with her intensively on the book for eight months, and when it came out, he was proved right: with worldwide fame following her success at home in Japan. The story Kondo herself tells is a little different. As she describes it, after setting up her organising business as a student, she gradually gained so many clients that she had a waiting list, at which point people started begging her to write a book so they could gain her expertise. The book, she has said, took three months to write. Like all the best superhero-origin stories, Kondo’s is a story of continual triumphs over adversity. In the past, she has related how her mania for throwing things away as a child eventually drove her parents to ban her from tidying. But it was her mother’s zeal for housework that initially inspired her interest. ‘She would go about it with so much joy, it looked like she was having so much fun,’ she tells me. Her childhood home was ‘a very normal, ordinary Japanese home. It looked very organised on the surface, but once you opened the shelf [sic] it was very cluttered.’

Kondo and her husband Takumi at last year’s Oscars Credit : Reuters

As a schoolgirl, she became so obsessed with purging her possessions that she had something akin to a spiritual awakening. ‘I would come home from school every day and wander round the house with a rubbish bag looking for things to throw away,’ she has recounted previously. ‘One day, when I opened the door of my room, everything in it looked dark and murky and I thought, “I hate everything in this room, I’m going to throw it all away, I never want to tidy again.” And I fell to the ground.’ When she awoke two hours later, ‘Everything in the room was shining and I realised that you shouldn’t be looking for things to throw away, you should be looking for the things you want to keep.’ Perhaps the greatest misconception about the KonMari Method is that she does not, in fact, insist that you should chuck out most of your possessions; rather, as The New Yorker put it, she advocates a kind of ‘transformative existential keeping’. Despite the medieval-sounding fainting spell, and the fact she worked for five years in a Shinto shrine, she refuses to describe her work as a religious calling or even spiritual. But that childhood revelation did lead to what is the central differentiating principle to her method: a kind of animism. Before you discard something, she asks you to thank it for its service; she thanks her purse when she puts it away at the end of each day. To non-Konverts this may sound silly, but it’s oddly freeing. As someone who clings to things out of guilt, it has helped me.

Once Kondo arrived at university, her hobby was allowed free rein. ‘I would tidy my friends’ homes, and eventually word spread that when Marie comes to visit, your home becomes remarkably tidy and organised. Gradually, people I didn’t know would say, “I would pay you to teach me how to organise my home.” This made me see that this might be something that can be shared with a wider audience. Little by little it led to my establishing a business.’ But when she tried to scale it up from one-on-one ‘tidying lessons’, it wasn’t an immediate hit. By then in her mid-20s, she had quit an unsatisfying job at a staffing agency to go full-time and describes, in Joy at Work, being crushed with embarrassment when ‘only four people signed up for my first seminar, and two cancelled at the last minute. In the large, almost empty, seminar room, I struggled to get my points across, painfully aware of my own inexperience. I felt so miserable and so sorry for the poor participants that I longed to run away and hide.’ Rather than giving up, she looked at the problem rationally, decided she needed to market herself better, built up from smaller groups to larger ones, and found her way again.

You have been Kondo’d... A bedroom transformation by a certified KonMari consultant Credit : Instagram @tidywithbecky @ten_and_co

Watching her debut book take off was ‘thrilling’, but as it grew bigger, so did the pressure to be ‘Happy Marie, always full of joy’. ‘I started to create my own obstacle,’ she recalls, ‘telling myself I needed to be constantly sparking joy in my own life. Otherwise, I don’t have the right or permission to share this message with the world.’ In 2015, when sales for her books had reached eight figures, she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and became inundated with offers from around the world, accepting as many as she could. She was also pregnant with her first child, and the pressure, as she writes in Joy at Work, ‘took a toll on my mind and body. Sometimes I couldn’t control my emotions and would burst into tears at the end of the day.’ She describes being physically and mentally exhausted, and ultimately, she realised that ‘I simply couldn’t go on like this’.

The arrival of her daughters – as for any minimalism-inclined parent – was equally challenging and, in fact, led to her largely abandoning her perfectionism, something she has not admitted until recently. In fact, one of the sharpest criticisms of her method has been that it’s unrealistic when you have children. But in Joy at Work, she reveals a far more believable scenario. ‘Even before I had my own, a lot of my clients had children, so I based a lot of what I learnt on their experience and I firmly believed that tidying was possible, even with children,’ she says now. ‘But after I had my own, particularly when my daughters were one or two years old, and they were completely out of control and would overturn the shelves and make a mess, that’s when I realised it is really very difficult.’ When I ask whether her decision to be more honest had been influenced by her move to America, and its far more emotionally revelatory culture, she turns and speaks to someone, and I realise she’s not alone – her husband is in the room. She bats away the idea, but tells me that ever since that low point, they do, as a couple, something that sounds distinctly LA: a ‘joy analysis’. Once a month they sit with a sketchbook and figure out what’s on their agenda for the next few months, whether that will make them happy, what they should commit to and what they shouldn’t. Takumi, who she met in front of a lift when she was a student, and was friends with for six years before they became romantically involved, is CEO at KonMari Media, and is the most supportive of husbands, taking on all the childcare and housework when her work is at its busiest. ‘He is naturally very good at organising,’ she nods, approvingly. ‘And he’s so great at cooking, he is a master.’