Kim Sok Bom was born in 1925 in the Ikaino district of Osaka. As a writer who has spent most of his life in Japan and writes in Japanese, Kim's work is considered abstruse even compared to other Japanese writers. Kim, who began publishing in Japanese in the early 1970s, made the decision to use Japanese to write about Korea and his struggle with his Zainichi identity. Thus, while written in Japanese, Kim's work is a far cry from the Japanese canon in both subject matter and style. Kim, too, refuses for his work to be considered as Japanese literature.
1. Life
At the time of Kim's birth, Osaka was home to many Zainichi Koreans, with Ikaino in particular harboring many who fled from the Jeju Uprising. After Kim learned of the incident in 1951, its reconstruction in his work became nothing short of a literary vocation for the author. His subsequently published works Kanshu Baku Shobō (看守朴書房 Pak Seo-bong the Gaoler) (1957), Karasu no Shi (鴉の死 The Death of the Crow) (1957), Kantokutei (觀德亭 Gwandeokjeong Hall) (1961), Mandoku yūrei kitan (万徳幽霊奇 譚The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost,)(1970), and Mangetsu (満月 Full Moon) (2001) are all devoted to the subject of the Jeju Uprising.
Kim's magnum opus, Kazantō (火山島 Volcano Island), was completed over a period of 30 years from 1965 onwards. The work was awarded the Asahi Shimbun's Jirō Osaragi Prize in 1983, during its serialization in Japanese, and the Mainichi Art Prize in 1998 after its publication in book form. Kim's name is also regularly mentioned in Japan as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The complete translation of Kazantō into Korean, Hwasando (화산도 Volcano Island), was published in 2015. Hwasando is set in the chaos of the postwar years of 1948 to 1949 immediately preceding the Jeju Uprising. The author, however, does not limit himself to Jeju, but roams from Seoul to Mokpo, Osaka, and Kyoto, featuring characters from all walks of life. The epic scale of the finished work, in terms of sheer quantity and the diversity of characterization and locale, is considered to paint a vivid portrait of not just the political situation at the time but of the economy, family life, and sociocultural milieu. Kim's mixed use of direct and indirect narration effectively combines the inner dialogue of the characters with the author's gaze, embodying the individual as historic figure.
LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 