The Wilds of Shikoku
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 contains a removable watercolor map of Shikoku by Alice Cleary.
It 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.
- 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 Akos Polgardi and Asami Ikeda
- 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. Shipping is $5 to Estonia and $15 to everywhere else.
If you live in Hungary, you can save on shipping and support a great indie bookstore if you buy your copy at ISBN Books + Gallery in Budapest.
Praise for The Wilds of Shikoku
“You know it’s a good book when it has a map in it”
“A psychogeographical masterpiece”
“An essential travelogue”
A note on Shikoku
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.
About the author
📷 Portrait by Nishimoto Kyōko
My name is Peter Orosz. I write stuff and take pictures. I live in Tartu, Estonia. My family name is pronounced “O-ros” — it’s the Hungarian word for “Russian”, which I am not.
The Wilds of Shikoku is my first book. I’m also the author of These Walking Dreams, a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.
I’m currently at work on my second book, A Something Like Peace, which is going to be about re-thatching a medieval farmhouse in the hills north of Kyōto, Japan’s old capital. It will be published in 2023.
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You’ll get a physical copy of the book in the mail and PDFs for instant reading.