Marie Kondo v. Tsundoku: Competing Japanese Philosophies on Whether to Keep or Discard Unread Books

By now we’ve all heard of Marie Kon­do, the Japan­ese home-orga­ni­za­tion guru whose book The Life-Chang­ing Mag­ic of Tidy­ing Up became an inter­na­tion­al best­seller in 2011. Her advice about how to straight­en up the home, brand­ed the “Kon­Mari” method, has more recent­ly land­ed her that brass ring of ear­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry fame, her own Net­flix series. A few years ago we fea­tured her tips for deal­ing with your piles of read­ing mate­r­i­al, which, like all her advice, are based on dis­card­ing the items that no longer “spark joy” in one’s life. These include “Take your books off the shelves,” “Make sure to touch each one,” and that you’ll nev­er read the books you mean to read “some­time.”

But as a big a fan base as Kon­do now com­mands around the world, not every­one agrees with her meth­ods, espe­cial­ly when she applies them to the book­shelf. “Do NOT lis­ten to Marie Kon­do or Kon­mari in rela­tion to books,” the nov­el­ist Anakana Schofield post­ed to Twit­ter ear­li­er this month. “Fill your apart­ment & world with them. I don’t give a shite if you throw out your knick­ers and Tup­per­ware but the woman is very mis­guid­ed about BOOKS. Every human needs a v exten­sive library not clean, bor­ing shelves.” Fur­ther­more, “the notion that books should spark joy is a LUDICROUS one. I have said it a hun­dred times: Lit­er­a­ture does not exist only to com­fort and pla­cate us. It should dis­turb + per­turb us. Life is dis­turb­ing.”

Wash­ing­ton Post book crit­ic Ron Charles crit­i­cizes Kon­do’s book pol­i­cy from a dif­fer­ent angle. “I have a sin­gle cab­i­net full of chipped mugs, but I have a house full of books — thou­sands of books. To take every sin­gle book into my hands and test it for spark­i­ness would take years. And dur­ing that time, so many more books will pour in.” That phe­nom­e­non will be famil­iar to read­ers of Open Cul­ture, since we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured tsun­doku, a pun­nish Japan­ese com­pound word that means the books that amass unread here and there in one’s home.

Though they might have emerged from the same wider cul­ture, the Kon­Mari method and the con­cept of tsun­doku could hard­ly be more direct­ly opposed. But now that Schofield, Charles, and many oth­ers have voiced their per­spec­tives, the bat­tle lines are drawn: must books spark joy in the moment to earn their keep, or can they be allowed to pile up in the name of poten­tial future use­ful­ness — or at least use­ful dis­tur­bance and per­tur­ba­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Change Your Life! Learn the Japan­ese Art of Declut­ter­ing, Orga­niz­ing & Tidy­ing Things Up

Orga­ni­za­tion Guru Marie Kondo’s Tips for Deal­ing with Your Mas­sive Piles of Unread Books (or What They Call in Japan “Tsun­doku”)

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.