The White Shoe That Could Not Walk, Seen on Valentine's Day

February 14, 2026, Valentine's Day.
I saw a white ceramic high heel named "For the Sake of Love."

The shoe sat beautifully at the foot of the stairs leading down to the basement.

The Spanish-style Western mansion, both its building and garden, felt as if time had stopped somewhere, and the white high heel placed there looked as if it were waiting for someone, or perhaps as if it were no longer waiting for anyone at all.

The title of the work is "For the Sake of Love" by Ryosaku Miwa.

What one imagines from the words "for the sake of love" might, in truth, be something much sweeter and softer.

However, what stood before me was a white, hard, and pointed ceramic shoe.

It cannot be worn.
It cannot walk.
Yet, it looks as if it is trying to head somewhere.
It also looks as if it is waiting for someone to wear it.

Was love always this beautiful and this painful?

I learned about this work later, but it seems Ryosaku Miwa was an artist who brought great surprise to the world of ceramics by releasing a series of white Hagi ware modeled after high heels.

While inheriting the long-standing traditional techniques of Hagi ware, the fact that what was born from them was not a "vessel" but a white high heel.
I was very drawn to that.

When we speak of tradition, we sometimes think of it as keeping to a set form.

But in reality, that is likely not the case.

Techniques inherited from predecessors.
One's own discipline.
The sure sense of the hands that handle clay and glaze.

It is only because of that accumulation that form can finally become free.

It is not about breaking things without knowing anything, but rather, because one knows them deeply, one can move away from them.
Because there is a mold, one can transcend the mold.

I felt that this white high heel was not just something eccentric, but a work that stands upon a long passage of time.

A shoe that cannot be worn.
A shoe that cannot walk.
Yet, a shoe that seems to hold the memory of someone's feet.

Although it is white and beautiful, it is somehow painful and a little frightening.
But I cannot take my eyes off it.

The "For the Sake of Love" I saw on Valentine's Day was not a form of sweet love.

Rather, it seemed to quietly offer up the pain, loneliness, and the sign of trying to move forward anyway that exists within love.

Even though they cannot walk,
they are still certainly heading somewhere.

For the sake of love.