Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

"I want to talk about it as an example of this genre of minimalist self-help lifestyle books. Marie Kondo was not the pioneer of minimalism in the United States, though this lifestyle movement is almost solely associated with her. Before her, there was a group of bloggers in the 2000s, following the financial crisis, who were presenting these ways to live with less stuff, or get out of debt, or just embrace simplicity. These were not necessarily design-minded people, or artists or creatives in New York. Some of them were, like, religious people in the Midwest who claimed that Jesus was a minimalist. I think those bloggers, and then the success of Marie Kondo, primed the publishing industry for this explosion of minimalist self-help books, and Fumio Sasaki is a really interesting and funny example because it’s so extreme. “The problem of minimal self-help is that it often presents a single solution to all these problems” Sasaki is actually an executive at a publishing house, but throughout the book he describes how he is dissatisfied with his job and feels like he has failed in life. He buys cameras but isn’t a photographer, he owns DVDs, but isn’t enough of a movie snob. It’s a very strange narrative, of having failed to translate creative interests into taste or into a successful career. So he decides to give it all up: no more camera, no more DVDs, no more TV. ‘I’m just going to live in my empty little box-like apartment, and that will help me like transcend my identity as a loser’—as he calls himself, which is kind of sad. I think so. The problem of minimal self-help is that it often presents a single solution, a single aesthetic, as the answer to all these problems—like creative frustration, and just a lack of feeling successful as a human being. His solution is instead to have no expectations, and exist on as small a scale as possible. So he reduces expectations to nothing as well. And, to me, that’s, that’s a very sad answer to those problems. This book, as in this whole self-help genre, has a very funny structure. They’re less memoirs or essays than literal manuals: step-by-step lists, with tips and tricks and little boxes and stuff. Sasaki not only describes how he cleaned out his apartment, but has a list of everything he earns, and suggests that you try to buy the same things. He tells you why you should live with only one low table instead of, you know, a dining room. So I think this book in particular presents a particular aesthetic and style that goes with ‘the minimalist lifestyle.’ There’s a connection that formed in the past five or ten years between living simply and the art or design mode of minimalism. This book is part of that. Yes. Another reason why minimalism is appealing to people is that it does have this moral quality: it not only promises that you can be in control of what’s around you, but it also promises that you are doing the right thing. You are living the right way. The morally pure way of living. I think there’s a high-mindedness, almost a pretension that comes with a lot of minimalism: that the minimalist has found the right way to live, and therefore everyone else should to. That comes through in Marie Kondo as well, I think, and particularly in the kind of pious minimalism or pious asceticism of St Francis and other parts of the Catholic Church. There is an association of simplification and narrowing down with spirituality and morality, because you’re disconnecting from the earthly things and instead focusing upon the ineffable. “There is an association of simplification and narrowing down with spirituality and morality” But I just think that that’s not always the case. Like, you can throw out a lot of your possessions and still be really obsessed with your remaining possessions. Or you can focus on asceticism to such an extent that it becomes its own obsession or fetish. St Francis wouldn’t sleep in his monk cell unless it was dirty enough. You know: I’ll only use a rock for a pillow. The pursuit of minimalism sometimes undermines minimalism itself. It becomes an extreme pursuit. There’s a connection between minimalism and optimisation. You’ve refined what you’re carrying, or what’s around you to only the best and most ideal and perfect objects, right? So you’ve essentially achieved this Nirvana of consumerism. Or, not consumerism. A Nirvana of objects. You’ve found the perfect things. If you were using more, you’d just be wasting your time or energy. But I think minimalism shouldn’t be about optimization. All these different artists and writers were more often using minimalism as a way to question the world around them and find meaning in unexpected places rather than like, seek a perfect solution."