'A Sleeping Forest' - another Takuya Kimura jdorama
I know that somewhere koalathebear must be shaking her head: yes, I finished watching A Sleeping Forest, a mystery/supsense/thriller jdorama starring Takuya Kimura as Ito Naoki and Nakayama Miho as Oba Minako. Koala, you aren't going to believe this...I liked it. A lot. Yes, you read that right.
It's totally unlike any of the other Kimura jdoramas that I've watched or skimmed: Good Luck, Long Vacation, Love Generation, Beautiful Life, Engine, Pride or Hero. This is dark, angsty and tragic with a twisty, suspenseful storyline that still managed to surprise me. I thought I had guessed who the villain was early on, but then changed my mind halfway through, and so therefore was surprised at the end.
Minako is a 27 year old woman who is three months away from marrying 35-year old Hamazaki Kiichiro, the son of a world-famous painter. While going through her belongings as she prepares to move into a new apartment with her fiance, she finds letters that were written to her when she was an adolescent after the death of her parents and sister in a car accident. The letters are strange and mysterious, from someone who obviously had watched her as a child and seems to have some kind of deep connection with her. The letters told her to meet him in the Sleeping Forest in Gunma in 15 years. She is startled to realize that the date they should meet has crept up on her, so she takes a train and goes to the forest. That may sound really stupid, but Minako has lost her entire family, and even her childhood memories are shrouded in mystery and secrets, and this is someone who seems to know an awful lot about her - the siren song that seduces her to the Sleeping Forest is very tempting.
Once there, she meets a mysterious young man, Ito Naoki (Takuya Kimura), who tells her surprising things about herself - things that he couldn't possibly know, and while she is disturbed, she is also curious and intrigued. And with this encounter, she embarks on a twisting, uncertain path toward recovering the truth of her childhood, because she feels that without discovering her shadowed, hidden past, she will never be able to move on and have a happy future.
Sure, this jdorama is flawed, even extremely so at times, but I came to really love the characters. When I first met Ito Naoki, I giggled helpessly at his melodramatic, every-so-slightly wild-eyed character, and I kept muttering "Crazy stalker! Crazy stalker!" at the screen. However, I came to love Naoki (who loses the 'crazy' after awhile) and by the end, my heart absolutely broke for him. He won me over completely. Naoki begins this story as an egg, almost - and so does Minako, and their paths are oddly parallel as they emerge and grow and begin to discover who they really are. Minako annoyed me at first, but then I developed a real sympathy for her plight, and I even admired her courage as she determinedly stays the course towards uncovering the truth of her past.
Takuya Kimura is absolutely gorgeous in this series - long hair and all, and his acting is also very beautiful. I was so moved by many of his scenes, and a few of them had me quite choked up. Acting-wise, this is definitely one of my favorites of his, even if story-wise I don't love it as much as some of the others.
Is this jdorama for everyone? Like some of the others that I love, probably not. But it was gripping enough that I never once felt the urge to fast-forward - something that I couldn't help doing with parts of Beautiful Life (which I did like), and most of Engine and Pride (about which I'm fairly ho-hum).
I didn't really know what to expect when I first started watching it, and I was nearly so turned off by Kimura's "crazy stalker guy" in the first episode that I almost didn't continue. But Kimura love pushed me onwards, and I came back to it, and found myself entranced.
SPOILERY
Minako's memory was altered after her entire family was massacred in her childhood home, and she was a witness. In shock, she couldn't provide testimony, and the uncle that adopted her had her undergo hypnotherapy to bury her memories and build new ones for her. I loved the revelation when I understood why Naoki and Minako love all the same things and share the same exact memories. I kept hearing his voice when he told her "I am a part of you and you are a part of me" (or something like that). I actually really love the way their relationship develops, and I love how their connection builds and is solidified both through their current contact and through even deeper bonds that they uncover. Yes, there are creepy elements, but not too creepy, in my opinion. And ultimately, their relationship is the most beautiful relationship in the entire series - pure, and untainted. Which is why the tragic ending is even more palpable.
Her older sister's boyfriend, Kokubo, the first on the murder scene, was believed to have massacred the family, and was sentenced to life in prison, but after 15 years he gets released on parole, so while Minako is uncovering her past, Naoki, who has been watching her from afar since she was twelve years old, is also acting as a guardian of sorts, as he tries to keep tabs on Kokubo, who has slipped his parole officer and disappeared. Naoki fears that the man may try to exact revenge upon the survivor for his incarceration - Naoki has never entirely believed that Kokubo was responsible for the deaths, and while he is keeping tabs on both Kokubo and Minako's fiance Kiichiro (at first Naoki wants to break them up so he can have Minako for himself since he imagines that he is in love with her), he also tries to understand (as Minako does later as well) what really happened that Christmas Eve fifteen years ago.
When it is revealed that Minako's fiance was a classmate and fellow-dorm resident of Kokubo, I was very suspicious, and I immediately though that he must be the real murderer because it was too easy for Kokubo to have killed those three people, one of them being the girlfriend he was about to elope with. But I couldn't think of a motive that Kiichiro would have to kill all of those people. I did think it was very creepy that he met Minako when he was a nineteen year old college student and she was a twelve-year old girl still in pigtails, and that he kept tabs on her through the years and then met her, and is now engaged to marry her. I thought that was far more weird than Naoki keeping tabs on her. Maybe it's the age thing - I thought at first that Kiichiro had fallen for the child Minako, which is just yechy yechy yechy to me. Naoki is two years younger than her, so it didn't feel quite as creepy that he should become fixated on a childhood playmate.
As it turns out, Kiichiro's relationship with Minako is far more sinister than I'd suspected, but I won't blow the big revelations here.
It's interesting that all three of the principles have lost significant family. Naoki lost his mother when he was a young boy. Minako lost her entire family when she was twelve, and Kiichiro lost his mother, who simply walked out on him and his father when he was also twelve. His mother was declared legal dead at midnight on Christmas Eve - the same day that Minako's family was murdered.
I eventually came to believe that Kiichiro's mother had committed the murders because everyone else seemed to have a plausible alibi, but I still couldn't figure out what her motive would be to kill mother, father and eldest daughter but leave the youngest alive. As it turns out, I was wrong.
F
There are red herrings along the way, one of them being rather significant - the revelation of Minako being abused by her father, and then further discovering that he wasn't her father, but that she was actually born of infidelity. I actually love who her father turns out to be. When Minako discovers that she was abused, she has another flashback and remembers seeing herself in a mirror that fateful night, bloodstained and holding a bloody knife. Of course she thinks that she must have killed her family, despite both Naoki and Kiichiro telling her that she had no motive to kill her mother and sister, even if she could ever have been so angry with her father as to murder him.
The secondary characters of Naoki's childhood friend, Nakajima Keita, and Naoki's ex-girlfriend, Sakuma Yuri, (he breaks up with her in the first episode because he thinks he's in love with Minako) are interesting - at first they annoyed me, and I never warmed up to Yuri who irritated me mightily through most of those series (she is also the most two-dimensional character), but Nakajima was actually pretty neat. A compulsive gambler, he was always getting beaten up by debt collectors; Naoki employs him to do detective work by keeping tabs on Kokubo and Kiichiro, and Naoki also used him to keep track of Minako in the past. Nakajima has also been in love with Yuri for a very long time, and despises the way that Naoki is so careless and cruel with her. Unfortunately he's weak, so he ends up playing both sides by reporting all of his research to Kiichiro who pays Nakajima handsomely to keep tabs on Naoki for him. Poor Nakajima is caught between these two nearly elemental forces as they tug him one way and then another, and he's really not strong enough to resist either. The end of his story is deeply tragic, as is the end of Yuri's story, although I will confess my pity mostly rested with Naoki who has to carry the terrible burden of both their fates.
Yes, there is a big melodramatic confrontational climax at the end of the series, and all the pieces fall into place. I thought that the finale could have been a bit more hopeful than it ends up being, though, as Naoki's story does not end well, although Minako may yet find some peace in her life, I think. I'm terribly regretful about how they ended Naoki's story, because I thought it was unnecessary to pile on the tragedy when the story was already quite tragic enough, thanks.
Still, the ending is not enough to make me dislike the whole dorama, which was very emotional, and as I stated before, I just adore Naoki's development as the series goes on. He learns so much and grows up and becomes something quite wonderful by the end - the person he is at the beginning and the person he becomes by the end are so far apart, which is why I feel so sad for his fate - it's almost like all that development was wasted. And yet, I still love the series! I'm so torn...
From the press conference:
