The art of ‘intentional space’

Marie Kondo’s Letter from Japan is at once an intimate postcard and a manifesto: Part memoir, part cultural primer, and part practical theology of household life.

- SUDHA G TILAK

In this quietly persuasive book, she returns not to reinvent the KonMari method (her tidy commandments are already part of the global domestic lexicon), but to locate that method within a longer Japanese conversation about beauty, ritual, and the ethics of things. The result is less a “how-to” than a set of invitations: To notice, to honour, and to empty space in order to feel something more fully.

Elegantly produced with Japanese typeface serving as ornamental letters and watercolour brush strokes for breaking chapters, the book is organised around discrete practices and ideas like the tea ceremony’s attention to gesture, the garden’s seasonal patience, the domestic reverence behind age-old household traditions, that Ms Kondo traces back to childhood memory and communal life. She writes with the modest authority of someone who has lived these customs and then translated them, gently, for a readership hungry for concrete spiritual practice inside the home. These chapters do the work of contextualising KonMari: Tidying is not austerity but a cultural habit of offering respect to objects and relationships, and of cultivating “ma” or the meaningful negative space in life.

Written with her television costar Marie Iida, the prose is conversational: