Dust bunnies of the heart

Plus: the behind-the-scenes story of how Marie Kondo got her mojo

I did it. I finally managed to sort through my clothing in the attic, and throw a giant bag’s worth of them away. This was part of my osoji, as an annual big cleaning is called in Japanese. Osoji is similar to spring cleaning in the West, but it is a year-end tradition here, a way to get ready for welcoming the New Year. I did other kinds of cleaning, too, such as scrubbing out the filters of my kitchen stove’s hood, and wiping all the windows. But I left the attic for last, perhaps out of procrastination. But I made my way up there, and eventually sorted what I’d stored away into two piles: one of clothes to keep, and one of clothes to be thrown away.

Japanese cleaning is world-famous now thanks to Marie Kondo’s books. But Japan’s cleaning tradition has actually a much longer history. As I wrote for The New Yorker several years back, Japan’s tidying tendencies stretch back more than a thousand years. There’s a 10th century book called the Engishiki, a handbook for the imperial household. It contained detailed instructions for the annual cleaning of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. This was a cleaning, but also a ritual intended to sweep away accumulated ill fortune and evil spirits in anticipation of a fresh new year. Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines followed suit, and the practice slowly spread to the public at large. By the seventeenth century, large swaths of the population were devoting much of December to tidying their homes and businesses, as a sort of offering to the kami in hopes of a fresh start. They called this annual cleaning event susu-harai: “the sweeping of the soot.” Today, perhaps because we don’t have as much soot from cooking fires and candles in our lives, we know it as osoji: a big cleaning.

Sweeping away dust with a bamboo “broom” at a Shinto shrine

As I went about this year’s big cleaning, I realized that cleaning and decluttering are actually totally separate things. Decluttering may be a part of cleaning, but discarding one’s belongings isn’t the same as, say, mopping floors or removing stains.

The publishing consultant Eiji Doi knew this, too. (This anecdote is from writer Atsushi Manabe’s 2024 book Jinsei wa Kokoro no Mochikata de Kaerareru? (Can a Change of Heart Change Your Life?), a history of self-help in Japan.) Doi was approached by a then-unknown Marie Kondo for advice on how to make a manuscript she’d written about cleaning into a best-seller. From long experience, Doi knew that a practical how-to book might sell 500,000 copies. This was nothing to sneeze at! But he, and Kondo, wanted to aim even higher.

It was Doi who gave Kondo a key insight: when people discard their personal belongings, they were also throwing away memories – or what he called shigarami. This is a concept that doesn’t correspond to any specific word in English. It carries meanings of “entanglement,” “ties,” and “bonds.” Doi advised her to re-frame her cleaning manual as a spiritual self-help book – a way to declutter your soul as you did the same for your home. You know how the story ends: with words like “sparking joy” and “Kondoizing” synonyms for tidying around the globe today.

I am pretty good at cleaning. It only requires physical effort and discipline, which I can maintain pretty easily. I actually enjoy cleaning, because removing stains or dust bunnies feels satisfying. It’s nice to see the fruits of my efforts in the form of a spotless floor or clean wall or whatever. But decluttering is another matter. I am terrible at getting rid of my personal items, especially my old clothes, even ones I haven’t worn in a long while. Because they possess something that stains or grime don’t: personal attachments. Maybe you can think of those attachments as dust bunnies of the heart.

Some of my clothes were quite old – a few I’d bought as many as fifteen years before! But they were in great shape, wearable, and looked cute. That was precisely why I couldn’t muster the heart to let them go. Oh, I’d tried over the years. I’d go through them, look at them, hold them, and then feel a wave of guilt wash over me for “wasting” something still usable. How dare I be so wasteful! So telling myself “I’ll wear them again someday,” I’d pack them back onto the racks, where they would slumber for many more years.

But “someday” never came. Until last weekend. I actually took out and wore those someday-outfits one by one, modeling them in the mirror. Each time I asked myself, am I REALLY planning to wear this in the future? I realized halfway through that this was echoing Marie Kondo’s method – and it was working. Most of the time when I saw myself in the mirror, it didn’t “spark joy” so much as laughter. It was obvious that I’d grown out of these clothes. And whenever I hesitated to make a decision, I’d walk up to my husband and look at his face. Usually his expression made both of us laugh even more.

And so I happily put the unwanted stuff into bags for recycling. (Here in Tokyo, clothing goes out in separate bags on the same day as recycling of paper products.) When I finished, I’d filled a 45 littler trash bag to the brim. My house is tiny, so this amount of stuff makes a big difference. As I took the bag outside, I felt like my house was thanking me for finally removing excess weight, lightening its load and making that attic feel more open. And it gave me more space for organizing my kimono, which I’ve been wearing more often in recent years.

Watching the recycling truck pick up the giant bag of old clothes, I asked myself: what kind of “entanglement” was it that I’d had with those outfits? What did I let go with them, what did I free myself from?

The answer for that, I think, is my attachment to my younger self. I don’t believe ageing is a bad thing – it’s a product of lived experience, which makes a person wiser. But growing old can be scary, especially in terms of physical looks – sometimes when I see myself in a mirror, especially when I’m off guard like in the morning, I can’t help but let out a little sigh.

Was my holding onto these clothes a subconscious wish for holding on to my youth? I don’t know. But I do know that getting rid of those outfits from my younger years let me focus more on the here and now, and in particular the clothing I like best: kimono. Those certainly “spark joy” in me, when I see myself in the mirror wearing them.

So I guess you could say, decluttering helped me sweep away the dusty old image of myself so that I could embrace my current identity. That’s a pretty great way to start a new year!