What a view | Queen of clean Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show might just change your life

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that ba-aaa-aaaad,” warbled Sheryl Crow. But now here comes Japanese clutter-killer Marie Kondo to tell you that some of what you once thought was making you happy should be sincerely thanked for its service and dumped.

There’s more: having Kondo in your condo can work wonders for your relationship, as well as on your mountain of overwhelmingly useless stuff, it seems. Which is perhaps the most remarkable lesson taken away from Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the newly released eight-part Netflix series on organising your life by blitzing your books, waging war on your wardrobes and clearing out your kitchen.

A “world-renowned tidying expert”, according to her PR tagline, ever-smiling assassin Kondo is on a “mission is to spark joy in the world through tidying”. And although that might sound insufferably twee, as the series progresses her minimalist (but hardly ascetic) approach to life and all the things with which we fill it has an unforeseen effect on a stressed family with two toddlers, a tearful widow, empty-nester retirees, newlyweds, two writers and more.

Clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous objects and items of sentimental value are assessed for the joy they do or don’t elicit, then retained and stored in their proper places, or tenderly held and thanked (almost spiritually) before being sent to the “eject” pile. The effect is profound; and although the temptation is to suggest the whole business might be just the latest fetish for an unsuspecting Westernised world, a Japanese-American couple are equally dazzled by Kondo’s approach.

Such is the burden that this high priestess of order and method lifts from her grateful acolytes that much more than their chaotic closets are transformed: rocks-bound unions flourish again and sudden mutual understanding puts the happiness back into homes. At times, Kondo seems like a misrepresented marriage-guidance counsellor.