I was not expecting to love this manga so much. I liked it after I read it, but the more I thought about it the more I loved it. I think it is my favorite manga, and I can't imagine a better manga, now that I have read it. It feels perfect, and there's nothing I would change about it.

My grandmother died when I was fifteen. Perhaps this is part of the reason this manga touched me so much. Mitsuya is faced with losing his beloved grandfather at around the same age.

More than ten years after she died, I found a scrapbook from her college years. Reading it, I saw a different woman from the one I had known. She was young, younger than I was, and in some ways it seemed like she was still alive as that young woman through the scrapbook.

When Mitsuya travels back in time, he is able to see and live through his grandfather's life at 16. He gets to know all the people that his grandfather loved, and becomes attached to them as well.

Golden Days begins with Mitsuya being sent back in time as a result of his grandfather's deathbed wish to save his childhood friend. Mitsuya is transported back in time during an earthquake, where he immediately sees the boy who was in the picture his grandfather showed him. Mitsuya is mistaken for Yoshimitsu (his grandfather) and believed to have either amnesia or multiple personalities. He is accepted into the place his grandfather occupied, and meets three people who were very important to his grandfather: Yoshimitsu's sister, Yuriko; Jin, the boy he is supposed to save who has unrequited feelings for Yoshimitsu; and Jin's little sister, Aiko, a cute little girl who must dress as a boy because her insane mother believes her to be her dead twin bother.

There are a lot of small plots going on, but they are all resolved by the end. I was surprised especially by what Jin is supposed to be saved from. (Mitsuya is also not expecting this, and keeps believing that Jin needs to be saved from physical harm).

The plot and romance do not really get started until about halfway through volume four. They are both really well set up from the small, almost slice of life chapters that occur before. Though we do have something major happening in the first chapter (Mitusya being sent back in time), the chapters afterward are very carefully setting up the situation necessary for the end.

The plot that finally appeared at the end was somewhat unexpected for me, despite it being set up since the first volume.

The protagonist's love interest is another boy, but it this is handled in a realistic (in my opinion) way. I think that people who do not normally like this genre could easily enjoy this manga. It is oftentimes more of a historical mystery or drama rather than a romance.

The art is very good. I prefer the black and white on the inside to the colored art on the outside. The historical furniture, architecture and clothing are very detailed. I feel that Takao has a talent for drawing the facial expressions of characters that display a lot of emotion without going overboard.

I loved the way my impressions of the characters changed as I read. After finishing the story and rereading the beginning, I found there were a lot of things I had not noticed before reading the ending. The characters and their relationships develop slowly, so the characters that Mitsuya doesn't know anything about become very close to him as his time in the past goes on (I think he is in the past around six months).

The ending is bittersweet (more bitter than sweet, actually), but I really liked it. It is one of the three manga I have read that made me cry at the ending.

Overall, I felt that the themes of this manga were about letting go of things. We cannot continue our lives if we hold onto the past. We can never hold on to anything in this life.