People who have seen my office will easily conclude that my approach to organising a room is somewhat at odds with Marie Kondo’s. I admit that what I know about Kondo is based on having watched just one episode (which I barely made my way through). But as is the case with all “reality” television once you’ve seen one episode, you’ve seen them all.
Kondo’s idea is simple: throw out all the stuff you don’t need, and be tidy with what’s left. If you live in a Japanese apartment (or in New York City), you’ll understand the idea pretty well. The most interesting part of her show was to see how she defined what to keep, something that has now made it onto parts of our Western popular culture.
According to Kondo, you keep what "sparks joy,” and everything else you say thank you to before you throw it out. My Japanese isn’t very good yet, so I was able to understand only very basic sentences or expressions. But the “spark joy” bit in the subtitles coincided with a word I thought I understood. When I Googled it, it turned out I had misunderstood her slightly, without the basic meaning being wrong.
Kondo had used “tokimeku”, while I thought she had said “doki doki”. Both words describe the same idea, the feeling you have when you get an excited thrill over something, let’s say when you run into a person you’re madly in love with and your heart starts beating fast. “Doki doki” is an onomatopoeia. “Tokimeku” is a variant of the idea, and you can find a pretty nice article about what it means and how it can be translated here.
(This is a video I found after typing “doki doki” into YouTube’s search box. It has almost 27 million views. Note the warning at the beginning.)
The other day I was asked to come up with a book for Photo-Eye’s end-of-the-year “Best Of” listing. I gave up compiling a list years ago; but I actually like the idea of picking one book, to attempt to give it a little boost.
How do you go about this, though? I’ve had to deal with this problem many times, and I never consciously thought about it, muddling my way through.
Enter Marie Kondo. I realised the connection only afterwards. But this time I essentially told myself to think of the book that had brought me the most excitement and joy this year.
This obviously doesn’t sound like much of a revelation. But these previous years, I had constructed all kinds of criteria (artistic merit, production quality, etc. — not that there’s anything wrong with that). Keeping it simple seemed like such a good idea, and when I thought of the book, there it was again: doki doki.
I’m not going to tell you which book I picked. You’ll have to wait until they publish their lists (I did review the book rather glowingly on my site already, though).
Sadly, my office still is a mess.
Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is the latest book from my to-read pile that I started and finished. There’s a lot of very exciting writing coming out of Japan these days by female authors, and this book is just one out of many.
I will admit that’s not the reason why I bought it. I came across the book at a Japanese book shop in San Francisco last year. I hadn’t heard about the book. But I had developed a strange obsession with convenience stores in Japan when I was there.
They’re quite unlike US convenience stores. To begin with, much like all Japanese stores, they’re incredibly clean. I heard that they double as shelters for people during an emergency (not sure this is true). They also have an incredible range of food items on sale, including the egg sandwiches that I ate large amounts of (you haven’t had a good egg sandwich in your life if you’ve never had a Japanese one).
And I always found the clerks in the stores mystifying. They’re incredibly friendly, to the point of making me feel uncomfortable (I’m German so I’m not used to people being to friendly to me). But there’s something oddly robotic about them as well. I thought maybe reading the book would help me understand this a bit better. And it did.
Browsing around on the web resulted in me finding an interview with the translator of the book, Ginny Tapley Takemori. I’m very interested in translation anyway, so this was a great read. Plus, included this fascinating quote:
“Murata always says that a book is like a musical score, and readers are the musicians; a book is only complete with their performances.”
I’m in awe of this idea. It’s so unlike what you run into in photoland, isn’t it, where so many photographers insist on this one read of their work. But I fully accept it: without my looking at a photobook, it’s devoid of meaning. I create its meaning along with its author. I don’t see her or him as dead — instead I see a co-creation, and Murata’s analogy of a musical performance is very charming.
Shameless self-promotion: I’d like to mention that I finally set up my new website. It includes the consulting and mentoring that I’m now offering. You can find all the details on the site — if you have any questions, simply send me an email.
Lastly, earlier this week I learned that Japanese photographer Hiroh Kikai had died. I had known that he had been gravely ill; still, the news hit me hard. I have long admired his work, and I enjoyed the many times I was able to spend in his company. One of the last dinners I had in Tokyo in late 2018 I had with him and two mutual friends. At the time, I had no idea that I would never be able to see him again.
It felt like the right thing to do for me to write an obituary for my site. Truth be told, I have never spent time thinking about how one actually goes about writing such a piece. As a result, the few times I had to do it I ended up improvising the writing through my own grief. Maybe that’s not such a bad approach; but emotionally, it’s very, very draining.
This concludes this iteration of my Mailing List. It feels as if these crazy times are only getting crazier as the US election approaches and the pandemic is rearing its ugly head in so many places. Time for a deep breath…
I hope you’re staying safe and well! And as always, thank you for reading!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
This Mailing List is my attempt to bring back some of the aspects that made early blogging so great -- community engagement and a more relaxed and maybe less polished approach to writing and thinking about photography. You can find the bulk of my main writing on CPhMag.com.
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