A Sleeping Forest is a drama I would never think of watching – it’s really old (’98) and shares many similarities (murdered family, trauma, lost memories, parental abuse etc.) with another Japanese drama – Innocent Love, which I absolutely hated. Despite this I’ve decided to watch it and… well, I’m really disappointed with it. Why? Let’s start with the plot. As I mentioned before, a story with a heroine who was highly traumatized in her childhood and lost her memories is used quite frequently in Japanese dramas, so I wasn’t really enthusiastic about this premise. Nevertheless the writers managed to catch my interest – mostly because of the dark, eerie atmosphere and some plot twists, also because of interesting characters. So why am I disappointed? Well, there is one thing in this drama that sucks big time – and this is the real culprit and his motive for murdering three innocent people. It was painfully obvious from the episode one who might be the murderer, but I kept on watching thinking “It surely can’t be so easy, Certainly, the writers have something up their sleeves!”. Well, they didn’t. And let’s not forget about this guy’s motive: it was absolutely laughable! I refuse to believe that somebody would kill three people just because of THAT (well, I can, but not in that context and not with this explanation!). Another thing that pissed me off was that there were many loose ends – something is important in one episode and then it magically vanishes in another to never be mentioned again (like the problems in fiancé’s work or why did Minako’s father kill her friend). The acting was decent. Kimura Takuya did a good job as always – his character was a bit ridiculous at times and had this highly annoying trait of pushing his hair back in a ‘sexy’ way (well, I didn’t find it sexy at all, but I can guess that it was aiming to be so), but he’s just an actor, he has to play what is given to him, so it’s not his fault. The main female lead – Nakayama Miho, is charming and I’d like to see more dramas/movies with her. The music was pretty good too, but they used U2 “With or without you” way too many times. Would I recommend this drama? Yes, because it was fairly entertaining – it had some good points and Kimura Takuya in a sleeveless shirt, so the time I spent watching wasn’t entirely wasted, but I’d advice you all to not have your hopes too high. I had and well, now I’m disappointed.