By her own account, Marie Kondo was an unusual child, poring over lifestyle magazines to glean organizing techniques and then stealthily practicing them at home and school, confounding her family and bemusing her teachers.

As she writes in “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” which comes out this month in the United States and is already a best seller in her native Japan and in Europe, she habitually sneaked into her siblings’ rooms to throw away their unused toys and clothes and ducked out of recess to organize her classroom’s bookshelves and mop closet, grumbling about poor storage methodologies and pining for an S-hook.

Now 30, Ms. Kondo is a celebrity of sorts at home, the subject of a TV movie, with a three-month waiting list for her decluttering services — until recently, that is, because she has stopped taking clients to focus on training others in her methods. Last Friday, I brought her book home to practice them.

What better moment to drill down and ponder the fretful contents of one’s sock drawer? Global and national news was careering from the merely hysterical to the nonsensical (the Ebola cruise ship incident was just peaking). Closer to home, other anxieties beckoned. But in my apartment on Second Avenue, the world was no larger than my closet, and I was talking to my T-shirts.