GIFT

WHAT IS "GIFT" ALL ABOUT?: It is about a guy who has lost his memory. We still don't know how it happened, but each week he seems to have some sort of flash back. It will be like piecing together a puzzle, which could be the interesting part about watching this drama. (I like mysteries!) What happened was that this woman went to a house to meet her boyfriend with whom she had planned to skip the country, along with 50 million yen in cash. When she gets to the house, there is no boyfriend, no money and a trail of blood leading to a closet.

Opening the closet causes this nude, blood covered body to come falling out. She gets the guy into a hospital to revive him in hopes he can tell her where the boyfriend and the money went, but the guy from the closet has lost his memory. She then employs him (probably to keep track of him in case he ever recovers his memory) as a courier. These are all shady characters in the story and there is a lot of cheating, lying, and graft going on. Each week's episode will probably revolve around something the courier delivers and the people he meets along the way. In this way, it isn't the typical continuing story. The only thing that continues is the fact that he is slowly regaining his memory and we may find out what all the bits of his memories add up to in the end. Three years ago, yukio (kimutaku) was found unconscious all bloody in a safe (and naked) in an apartment. The woman who found him was supposed to run away with this other guy with 50 billion yen but both the money and the guy were gone and the only one who might know something is yukio but yukio lost his memory so she sort of protects him and gets him to work for her making deliveries. shinohara ryoko plays a girl who tried to seduce yukio but got rejected. She was sent there by the woman boss to sort of find out more about him. Yukio can run very fast and when he does he remembers bits and pieces from his past, in this ep, he was delivering a letter to a teenage girl from her politician father, and had to rescue her because she left home and was coning money from old guys who sleeps with young girls and one of the guys she conned was after her. So yukio rescued her in order to deliver the letter, but she sort of liked him and she didn't want to go home 'cause her father has a lot of lovers and doesn't really care about her and so when she found out he lost his memory she got another girl to pretend that she was yukio's girlfriend which made him very frightened, so he ran away from the girl who was then captured by the bad guys along with the politican's daughter. Yukio and a detective lady (who was also on the case 3 years ago so she is also very interested in yukio's memory) then went to rescue them, thinking that the girl used to be his girlfriend and wanting to find out more, but when he found out that she was fake he was very disappointed. But after they rescued the girls, they were on top of the roof and he saw a big sign which was a commercial he saw in his dreams and when he was running and he started to remember bits when he was beat up and a man's face(his month mainly) and it was if as he did not want to remember who he was and what he did. [First episode synopsis is by Sandy Chou]

STARRING: Kimura Takuya, Muroi Shigeru, Shinohara Ryoko, Imai Masayuki, Kobayashi Satomi , Matsushita Yuki, Momoi Kaori, Bito Isao, Kirari, Suzuki An, Hazuki Riona, Kato Ai and more.
THEME: "Tokyo Joe" by Brian Ferry
NETWORK: FUJI TV
DURATION: April 16, 1997 through June 25, 1997.  11 episodes.
ASU JUDGMENT:  The newspapers printed how this drama is blamed for teenagers buying knives as weapons because it was "cool" in the drama.
* DOWNLOAD SYNOPSIS (NOTE: Synopsis contains spoiler / PDF - Download Adobe Acrobat reader to view).
REVIEWS:

A controversial drama because of the use of the knives (media assumed that the recent problem in Japan with children using knives were because of this drama).  Personally, I thought this drama was too slow for me.  It was o.k. but nothing like the other Kimura dramas I have seen. - KNDY