While a junior in 1962, Kim founded a literary Journal, The Age of Prose, and some of his first works were published there.

[7] His greatest success was "Seoul, Winter, 1964," a work that crystallized a Korean sense of loss and meaninglessness attendant to the industrialization of Korea and resulting nihilism.

In his early works, Kim shows a burning desire to escape the bounds of quotidian existence; he often does this through fantasy or hallucination.

Finally, just before he retired from fiction entirely, Kim attempted to use erotic passion in somewhat the same way he had used hallucination/fantasy in his earlier works.

Kim was the first Korean writer to win both the Yi Sang Literature Prize (he won the inaugural award in 1977) and the Dong-in Literary Award (In 1965, for Seoul, Winter, 1964), but after 1967 his creative energies began to dissipate and in 1979 he quit writing fiction.