Kim's debut short story "Outsider," published in 1993 when still in university, follows a first-person narrator passing several stops on the Seoul subway while recalling memories concerning a high school student he had once taught.
While depicting the expressions of anonymous crowds in the urban subterranean world, the narrator continuously mulls over movie scenes and bars of pop music.
The novel Morrison Hotel takes its title from the 1970s album of the rock group The Doors, and the short story collections Who Killed Kurt Cobain?
take their titles from the band leader Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who largely symbolized the 1990s, and the Hong Kong-based movie star Leslie Cheung.
He has also published The Golden Apple, a novel based on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and The Kingdom of a Thousand Years about the Dutch man Weltevree, who was shipwrecked on the shores of Chosun in 1627.