Marie Kondo's "spark joy"

I started listening to Marie Kondo on audiobook because I need more practice with essay-style Japanese for the JLPT, and hey I found it for sale for $8 in the USA region of Audible for once, instead of having to shell out 4000 yen on Apple Books Japan.

It’s a very well-written book! One thing that struck me so far is the legendary catchphrase “spark joy” turns out to be a creative translation of “tokimeku” (which videogame fans may know from Tokimeki Memorial):

Nice lateral thinking to change the metaphor to igniting some sort of fire inside. A more basic translation might’ve been “that makes your heart flutter with feeling” but among other problems, it’s a repeated keyphrase for Kondo so it needed to be more concise than that. A nice property of “tokimeku” is it’s optional to mention the human heart is the subject. Kondo often omits it or even creatively uses a different subject, indeed in the title of her book it’s “jinsei ga tokimeku” (your life flutters).

However, the word “joy” seems to be slightly more specific than Kondo intended: notice the dictionary also mentions “anticipation”, another fine reason to keep an object. In the context of the book that goes into detailed examples of what she means, that’s not a problem. But back when I had only heard of Kondo’s method in English as a secondhand summary, I did wonder what that meant for objects I was planning to use but did not feel particularly joyful about.