The Wilds of Shikoku

About the book

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

The book is slim and very large — 36 pages, 260 mm × 360 mm — and is published in an edition of 500 hand-numbered, unbound, softcover copies, with hand-screened covers.

This book is also available in a special edition of 16, Tokushima Blue, whose covers are printed on indigo-colored paper from Tokushima, where the walk begins.

Shipping and delivery

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

Shipping is $5 to Estonia, $15 to everywhere else. 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 at:

• ISBN Books + Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
• Tenjinyama Art Studio, Sapporo, Japan
• Local pickup, 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