Marie Kondo
In order to properly understand Kondo's opinion, the author explains a bit about herself, focusing primarily on her professional career as a tidier of spaces. Typically her clients feel that cleaning will be impossible, but Marie views her professional service this way: by addressing the clutter from her detached, objective point of view, she quickly organizes the clutter and strategizes about a way to fix the house. Kondo says that by this point in her career, she has a process that has helped her average about six hours of labor for each home—an unimaginable task for many of her clients.
The clientele
In order to explain her process, sometimes Kondo will mention client stories. These clients share a few basic qualities. First, their houses are beyond messy. Kondo says that many if not most of her clients feel emotionally trapped in their own clutter. She helps to offer freedom to hoarders and those who are chronically phobic of cleaning. She says that her clients are people who feel that cleaning will be an impossible task. That means Kondo is not a maid; she is a teacher who teaches her clients that cleaning is healthy and fun and good.
Prized possessions
The idea of treating one's possessions as spirits or people is invoked by Kondo throughout the book. In her opinion, items or possessions are literally characters with whom an owner has a relationship. By accepting that premise, she can begin to frame the cleaning process for what it really is; it is a mourning process through which her clients can grieve the loss of their possessions, working through their emotional attachments to things that don't actually matter. She treats their property as a part of their own self, and helps them detach from those possessions.
