The Wilds of Shikoku: Tokushima Blue

About the book

Tokushima Blue is a special edition of The Wilds of Shikoku, a book about a five hundred kilometer walk across Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, in January and February 2019.

The indigo-colored cover is printed on paper from Awagami Factory, a seventh generation papermaker. They are based in Tokushima, which has been the home of Japanese indigo dyeing for centuries and where the walk described in the book begins. There are 16, hand-numbered copies, one for each day of the walk.

Tokushima Blue is otherwise identical to the regular edition of The Wilds of Shikoku: a slim, very large — 36 pages, 260 mm × 360 mm — unbound, softcover book.

• Written and published by Peter Orosz
• Photographed by Peter Orosz and Gyula Simonyi
• Edited by Nora Selmeczi and Timothy Harris
• Cover screen printed by Geza Selmeczi
• Designed by Akos Polgardi
• Product photos by Marton Novak
• Printed in Budapest in August 2019
• ISBN 978-615-00-5728-6

Shipping and delivery

Your purchase includes a physical copy of the book and the PDFs of the digital edition, which are available immediately.

Please indicate at checkout if you’d prefer to receive a specific number from this edition of 16.

Available numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Shipping is free. Orders are sent from Estonia once a week, on Mondays. You’ll receive a tracking number from Omniva, the Estonian postal service. If you’re buying from outside the EU, you might have to pay customs and duties.

Shipping estimates:

• EU: 1–2 weeks
• US: 3–4 weeks
• Rest of world: 2–6 weeks

The book is also available for local pickup in Tartu, Estonia.

Reviews

“A psychogeographical masterpiece”

– Metropolis

“An essential travelogue”

– Japan Travel

What this book isn’t

The island of Shikoku is known for the pilgrimage in which henro, Buddhist pilgrims, walk between 88 of the island’s temples. This book is not about that journey. Instead, it follows in the footsteps of Alan Booth, the English author of The Roads to Sata and Looking for the Lost, who walked across Shikoku in May and June 1983. Booth’s account of his own journey, “Roads Out of Time”, was published in the anthology This Great Stage of Fools.

Credits

• Written, photographed, and published by Peter Orosz
• Additional photography by Gyula Simonyi
• Edited by Nora Selmeczi and Timothy Harris
• Map by Alice Cleary
• Designed by Akos Polgardi
• Printed by Pauker and Geza Selmeczi
• Product photos by Akos Polgardi and Asami Ikeda
• ISBN 978-615-00-5728-6

About the author

Portrait by Nishimoto Kyōko

I’m Peter Orosz, a Hungarian fool on the internet who lives in Estonia and writes in English about walking in Japan. The Wilds of Shikoku is my first book. You can read more about me on my website and check out what I’m doing now.

I’m currently working on my second book, which is going to be about another, much longer walk in Japan — nine thousand kilometers around the whole archipelago instead of five hundred kilometers across one of its islands. I’m writing a blog called Data Reduction 9K about this book’s progress:

If you’d only rather hear from me every once in a while, I also have a mailing list called In Between, where I send dispatches about my new and ongoing projects:

Email: peter@ilovewasting.ink

Last update: April 1, 2025