Like any South Korean director working in the pre-democracy era, Kim Ki-young operated proficiently within a range of genres. Deservedly much of Kim's international reputation is based on The Housemaid (Hanyeo, 1960) and his revisitations of that film, Woman of Fire (Hwanyeo, 1971) and Woman of Fire ‘82 (Hwanyeo ‘82, 1982) for their provocative representations of women and the sometimes-rickety foundations of South Korean male patriarchy. However, it is the purpose of this chapter to address The Sea Knows (Hyoenhaetan eun algoitta, 1961), a film which falls outside the portion of Kim's filmography that contributes to his “Mr Monster” appellation. With its combination of colonial era melodrama, anti-war sentiment, and provocative romance, The Sea Knows is a showcase for Kim's versatility making it worthy of attention alongside the director's better-known films.

The Sea Knows is especially distinctive in South Korean cinema for its provision of a Japanese love interest for the Korean soldier protagonist within its colonial setting. When assuming the presidency, part of Syngman Rhee's (1875–1965) response to Japan's colonial brutality was the implementation of a suppression on Japanese popular culture that also impacted South Korean cinema and its representations of Japan. This policy was periodically circumnavigated, but continued in various forms under subsequent Korean presidents, until it was lifted in 1998 by the Kim Young-sam administration in 1998. Given the rarely broken, ongoing taboos around South Korean cinema's depiction of interethnic romance and the film's rarely repeated choices offered to its Korean protagonist, The Sea Knows continues to have both political and cinematic relevance for addressing South Korea's relationship with Japan. The surge of films concerned with the colonial era made during Park Geunhye's presidency, the “Boycott Japan” movement that spiked in 2019, as well as ongoing controversies over Japan's culpability for the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” during wartime, and the territorial disputes over the Dokdo/Takeshima islands, all indicate that resentment toward Japan continues to smoulder and occasionally erupt in contemporary South Korea society. In the light of South Korean cinema's recent focus on such bilateral tensions, it is interesting to consider how twentieth-century Korean films such as The Sea Knows differ from recent approaches to the issue.