Yang Sok Gil is renowned for his novels describing, with remarkable humanity and humor, people's wanton desires and the problems they cause, often from the viewpoint of minorities in Japan or elsewhere.
As a second-generation Korean resident of Japan, Yang was born in 1936 to parents who moved to Osaka from Jeju, an island off the south of the peninsula, in the 1920s.
As he makes clear in his latest novel, "Ashita no Kaze" ("Wind of Tomorrow"), he grew up as a member of an ethnic minority discriminated against by native Japanese. Also, during U.S. wartime air raids on Osaka, Yang and his mother and sister were lucky to survive.
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