Whispering Rooms, a collaboration between Marie Kondo and the popular “cozy cat fiction” author Genki Kawamura, collects seven stories about a fictionalized version of Kondo named Miko who helps her clients tidy their belongings and sort out the problems in their lives.
The original versions of these stories were serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative print newspaper whose readership is an average of approximately one million years old. Despite its adult audience, this book is written at a third-grade reading level.
Though the writing style is simple, the problems faced by Miko’s clients are relatively serious. An older client wants to reconnect with her grown children before she dies, for instance, and a younger client is desperately trying to escape the shadow of her overbearing and hypercritical mother.
The most heartbreaking story is about a middle-aged man who became a hoarder after his divorce. He can’t bear to change anything about the house his wife and son once occupied, and he buys things online to fill the empty space. Tidying won’t change his personality or repair his relationship with his son, but it’s a start.
I suspect that this book’s target readers aren’t potential clients, but rather family members who have noticed a problem with a relative and need a concrete solution. If you’re struggling with a complicated family issue, it makes sense that intellectually challenging literary fiction won’t help – but perhaps accessible cozy fiction will.
If nothing else, I love the idea of Marie Kondo as a fictional character. Honestly I think her next adventure should be to use her tidying superpowers to solve mysteries. Or maybe she can commit some crimes herself! After all, if someone in the house doesn’t spark joy…
Contemporary Japanese Literature 