Yang Sok-il

Yang Sok-il (b. 1936, surname Yang) is a second-generation Korean-Japanese novelist. He first drew major acclaim in the 1980s with semi-autobiographical tales of a taxi driver from the gritty underbelly of Tokyo. He followed this in the 1990s with award-winning period pieces set in the lawless ‘Apache territory’ Osaka – including his best-selling Blood and Bone (Chi to Hone). A champion of the oppressed and alienated everywhere, Yang’s fictionalized exposé Children of the Dark (Yami no Kodomotachi), about child prostitution in Thailand, was also made into a major film.