The Wilds of Shikoku: PDF Edition

By

Peter Orosz

The Wilds of Shikoku is a field report 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 was published in August 2019 in a limited edition of 500 hand-numbered, unbound, softcover copies, with a hand-screened cover. The book is slim and very large — 36 pages, 260mm × 360mm — and contains a removable watercolor map of Shikoku by Alice Cleary. Purchase of the print edition includes the PDF edition at no extra cost.

• Written and published by Peter Orosz
  
• Photographed by Peter Orosz and Gyula Simonyi
  
• Edited by Nora Selmeczi and Timothy Harris
• Designed by Akos Polgardi
• Product photos by Akos Polgardi and Asami Ikeda
• ISBN 978-615-00-6741-4

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 in 2018.

Praise for The Wilds of Shikoku

“You know it’s a good book when it has a map in it”

– Moon Rabbit Podcast

“A psychogeographical masterpiece”

– Metropolis

“An essential travelogue”

– Japan Travel

About the author

📷: Kyōko Nishimoto / BUAISOU

My name is Peter Orosz (Orosz Péter in Hungarian — it’s pronounced “O-ros” and is the Hungarian word for “Russian”). You may have come across my work in Jalopnik, Wired, Roads & Kingdoms, and on other websites. The Wilds of Shikoku is my first book. I was born in Szeged, Hungary, in 1980, and have lived in Hungary, Japan, and the United States.

I’m currently working on my second book, which is going to be about a medieval Japanese farmhouse in the hills north of Kyoto, the country’s old capital. You can subscribe to my newsletter, In Between, to hear first about its publication, planned for 2021.