TV

Hypothetically, Marie Kondo Would Be A Great Murderer

The most efficient way to declutter is murder?

by Patrick Lenton  9 January 2019
Marie Kondo

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The world is currently neatly folded and laid out in front of tidiness guru Marie Kondo’s feet.

The bestselling author of four books on decluttering, including The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising, the so-called “Beyoncé of organisation” is once again huge news with her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.

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The inventor of the ‘KonMari Method’, Marie Kondo has basically made her fame and fortune by convincing people to chuck out anything that doesn’t bring them joy. She’s created a movement of aspirational minimalism, which I wholeheartedly enjoy and endorse. I love being neat, I love being clean, I love being ruthless with my stupid belongings. I think her crusade of cleanliness is admirable.

Marie Kondo brings me joy.

I also have a strong, and surprisingly rational belief that she would be a very successful serial killer.

Hidden From Society

What do we truly know about Marie Kondo?

Sure, she’s a public figure, beloved by her fans and the media. She’s an extremely successful author and businesswoman. She’s a wife and mother. Surely it would be hard to balance this kind of role in society against her hidden agenda as a bloodthirsty murderer?

But also, on the other hand, is that not the perfect cover? Much like a neatly tucked away baseball card collection, or a basement expertly packed with mementoes, who else would have the ability to compartmentalise their various lifestyles efficiently than Marie Kondo? While the world gets to see the joyful, clutter-loving, white-skirted delight, we’re distracted from the very real possibility that she could be an unrepentant killer of men.

She’s a highly curated media face — she’s admitted that she always wears white, because it’s associated with cleanliness. “It is part of my brand,” she told The New Yorker. She very carefully created the persona of Marie Kondo. But who is the real Marie Kondo? A murderer?

Perhaps.

Once we dig a little deeper, we discover that Marie Kondo is the public face for a ruthlessly private individual.

Famously, Marie Kondo has never let a journalist or media into her house. Despite spending her entire career entering other people’s houses. Is it simple privacy? Is she a secret hoarder, whose rats nest of old magazines and rotting pants would destroy her brand?

Or is her house simply full of the bodies of her murder victims?

Fold Away Your Husband’s Rotting Corpse

The thing is, we’d never, ever know if Marie Kondo was a relentless and escalating serial killer, who has terrified the city with her brutal crimes. She’s just too tidy.

I’m not saying the KonMari Method was invented to dispose of dead bodies, I’m just saying it makes the expert practitioner extremely good at doing so.

The KonMari method involves separating your life into five distinct categories, including clothing, books, paper, Komono and mementos. On the outside, that seems like there’s no mention of “corpses”, which you’d assume would have its own category.

But actually, “Komono” essentially means miscellaneous, and unless you’re truly one of the world’s rarest and most abhorred monsters, it’s unlikely you have enough dead bodies in need of disposal for them to be categorised as anything other than “misc other”.

One of Marie Kondo’s central tenets is to treat objects with sentimentality and respect — it’s not about being brutal or uncaring. You let something go and thank it for its service. Kinda how I imagine a serial killer might be at once be thankful to his victim, while still wanting to kill it. So, perhaps the bodies of Marie Kondo’s victims would be categorised as mementos? Serial killers do like to keep trophies.

But Marie Kondo isn’t going to have something crude like a jar of teeth or a string of mummified ears hanging around. Her mementoes are going to be beautifully labelled draws, or perhaps tasteful urns full of blood. You know, the Ikea showroom of murder-rooms.

Marie Kondo’s End Goal

While shopping at clothing store Anthropologie Kondo told The New Yorker that she doesn’t wear pants because “several years ago they stopped bringing her joy.”

That’s fine and great, pants are prisons for the legs. Removing things that don’t bring you joy is a good idea! It’s why I said farewell to that cruel bird that lived in my roof.

But it does shine a startling light on the long-term consequences of the KonMari Method, which for various reasons (some patriarchal, some practical) is aimed and consumed mostly by women.

The whole system is about decluttering your household, removing items from it that no longer bring you joy, or make you happy, or provide any real function anymore. It’s about getting rid of that useless, ceremonial statue of a duck that you were once weirdly passionate about twenty years earlier, but which has simply sat there gathering dust and an odd, predatory aura. It’s about looking around your beautiful, suddenly light-filled house and realising you have shed all the negative, useless, nasty things that were weighing you down.

So, if women are starting to get rid of useless things in their house that don’t bring them joy anymore, surely they’re starting to boot their husbands and boyfriends from their homes. They are starting to realise that their husband of thirty-seven years, Jimothy, is just like that useless duck statue.

You have to assume that women all around the world are realising that men do not fit within the prescribed notion of KonMari joy. They are clutter, they bring stress and pain, they are difficult to store.

Fold your dreadful Barry and Bill in half, and neatly store their body in the attic! Bag your non-committal boyfriend and place him on the sidewalk, to be gracefully collected by the council. Thank them for their service.

Perhaps, the long term mission of the KonMari method is to kill all men — and also perhaps that’s been the goal of Marie Kondo, secret murderer, all along?

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is currently streaming on Netflix!

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Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton. He does not think Marie Kondo has ever killed anyone, but knows that she’d be AMAZING at it if she wanted to do it.