The Wilds of Shikoku: Digital Edition

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.

Your purchase includes two PDFs. One is illustrated with photos and a watercolor map, and is designed for high resolution horizontal screens, while the other is text-only and is meant for black and white printing.

There is also a print edition of the book available for purchase separately. It is a slim and very large book — 36 pages, 260 mm × 360 mm — and is published in an edition of 500 hand-numbered, unbound, softcover copies, with hand-screened covers. Purchase of the print edition includes this digital edition at no extra cost:

Reviews

“A psychogeographical masterpiece”

– Metropolis

“An essential travelogue”

– Japan Travel

What this book isn’t

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 978-615-00-6741-4

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