Marie Kondo is a Japanese author and tidying consultant known for her KonMari Method and her global bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011). She gained international attention with her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo (2019), which was nominated for two Emmys. In 2015, she was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.
Marie Kondo was born in 1984 in Osaka, Japan. Kondo says she became interested in tidying at the age of five when fusui, the Japanese version of feng shui, became popular. Her mother began applying fusui principles, but Kondo felt their house was not clean enough to benefit. “I started tidying because the house didn’t feel right,” she later explained.
Kondo attended Chūō Ward Hisamatsu Elementary School and later Friends Girls Junior & Senior High School, a private Quaker school in Tokyo. As a child, she often preferred sorting bookshelves to playing outside. When her classmates participated in sports, she organised the classroom shelves. “I only wanted to be a bookshelf manager,” she recalled.
At 15, Marie read The Art of Discarding and began to study tidying more seriously. She later experienced what she referred to as a breakthrough. “I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted,” she said. “When I came to, I heard a voice telling me to look at things more closely. I realised I was focused on what to discard, not what to keep.” This insight led to the core principle of her later method: to keep only what sparks joy.
Marie Kondo studied sociology at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. While still a student, she launched her organising business. Her graduation thesis was titled Tidying up as seen from the perspective of gender. During this time, she also worked for five years as a maiden at a Shinto shrine.
In the following years, she developed the KonMari Method, a structured approach to decluttering based on joy and intentional living. Her first book was published in Japanese and later translated into 44 languages. It sold over 14 million copies worldwide.
Her Netflix show debuted in 2019 and became the platform’s top non-fiction release. It earned seven major award nominations, including two Emmys. That same year, Kondo’s work expanded further with the growth of KonMari Media, Inc.
Marie Kondo married Kawahara Takumi in 2012. He later became her manager and the CEO of her company. They have two daughters and a son and now live in Los Angeles.
Photo credit: konmari.com
