Skip to main content

Believing in Fairies: Marie Kondo and Our Oriental Attachments

Japan’s “floating world” has long provided the West with fantasies of both attachment and detachment, with the promise of refashioning our lives by “decluttering” and surrounding ourselves with only the most exquisite objects. Marie Kondo offers us a dream of minimalist Japanese beauty not unlike the dream of Japan that first enchanted the West in the Victorian period.