Fumio Sasaki, lauded as one of the great modern Japanese minimalists published Goodbye, Things in 2015, just in time to contribute to the firestorm that is the building minimalist obsession paired with The Minimalists, Minimal Mom, Marie Kondo, Dana K. White, and so many others. Grant it, not all of those listed qualify themselves as minimalist. Quite often they are just proponents of decluttering and living with intension, the simple life, etc.
This is one of those books I have read probably five times at this point. I just got done with another round of reading it. I’ve been a practicing minimalist since 2017. And a practice it is. In the same vein as meditation and yoga, showing up and participating is necessary to keep from getting rusty. I had this year where I really didn’t practice like I should have and ended up with so many bags of kids toys and several boxes of books to get rid of.
Some folk like having books around. For me, I had wrist surgery a couple of years back and have been struggling to get back into reading physical books. It only took me the last year to figure out why it was a struggle. Holding a book open for more than twenty minutes hurts. This actually made it easier to get rid of more books this go around than in past sweeps. I’ve just about got all of my books to fit into a particular cabinet I wanted them to fit in. The outliers are the recipe books above the microwave which I do use.
However, a good portion of Sasaki-san’s book has me on the war path to purge more out of my domain. I want to have less laundry to do, less dishes, less dusting and upkeep. And I’m pretty paired down at this point. A great deal of what is left are things that are shared amongst the family that I personally can’t get rid of. Mounds of boardgames that never get played. They aren’t mine, but they do occupy the space that I maintain. There isn’t room in the other family member’s office for them.
That’s something that I think might get lost in translation between a single minimalist and a family minimalist that people fail to extrapolate. They might say Sasaki-san’s minimalism is unachievable for families. And that’s failing to internalize quite a great many values found within the book. You don’t have to live out of a backpack to be a minimalist. He says that pretty early in the book. It’s a matter of getting to the point of having what you need. And that ‘need’ takes a long-long-long time to fully understand. “But I need this for xyz!” A person on the outside of that phrase might tell you “no, you don’t need that”, but for you, you still do. Your psyche still does. You have to come to a conclusion about needs in your own time. Hence practicing minimalist.
I still don’t feel like I have the house to where I would like it to be. Some of that is construction material floating around in strange spots.
I still have items that I am hard pressed to let go of, even though I really do want to let go: i.e. an Amish made solid oak rocking horse my godparents commissioned for me when I was born when the rest of my extended family figured I would die as a premie. That thing has no space in the house. It takes up a funny corner that I don’t like it being in, but I don’t really have any other good solutions. Ultimately, I should put it down at the curb and let some other family have it and get use out of it. To me, it symbolizes validity of my existence, and I really do need to pull myself out of keeping things for symbolic reasons. It’s hard. Practicing is not perfect.
The book itself is well written. The translators and editors did a great job.
It’s one of those top books that I would suggest people who have already gone through Marie Kondo or Dana K. White’s books look at. It feels like an intermediate minimalist book. Not because of difficult concepts, but because it will make you question things that you value even more so than the other books and that is something that can really wound an ego if you haven’t already had practice in letting go of some material possessions.
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Books in the Cottage 