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Have any manga (or other "light" media) surprised you with their quality of writing? There's an abundance of "what to read" resources on the web, but not nearly as much talk about how the language is utilized, which I find just as interesting.
This is all subjective, of course, but it might be a fun topic to discuss nonetheless. To start us of, I recently bought a big box of 名探偵コナン (Detective Conan), which I'm quite happy with. Some interesting grammar, lots of different thematically relevant vocab (mostly crime, naturally) and (less surprisingly) puns. Wouldn't nominate it for the Akutagawa, but it's definitely more demanding and satisfying than the cartoonish shounen I expected. Agasa is still goofy as hell, though, but I guess that kinda works in context.
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I read an elementary school level book called 西の魔女が死んだ that I though was quite beautifully written for a children's book.
Can't think of any manga examples though--sorry!
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I also like コナン - anime and manga - for the same reasons. Two others I would recommend are ナナ and 海月姫。
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I'll expect to be able to answer this question in a good ten years' time. People still learning a language can't judge quality of writing. Even if you're already fluent, you still need a few years of using the language before you're in a position to tell the good writers from the bad.
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I'm not qualified to judge the quality of writing in an absolute sense, but as a non-native speaker of Japanese I found the writing style of the following manga engaging and good learning material:
Pluto
20th Century Boys
- Basically anything by else by Naoki Urasawa
Death Note
I liked the above for mostly similar reasons, being that they are full of relatively normal dialogue that a relatively normal person could use in real life conversations without sounding like an idiot. As an intelligent, educated adult with a relatively serious demeanour and a respectable job, I find it challenging to find role models for my speech in Japanese manga but I think the ones above have quite a few options to choose from.
If you are a female, or you are particularly keen on sounding like a young boy / otaku then they are perhaps not for you, although from memory I think there were a few OK female characters in some of them. 20th Century Boys had a good female character as one of the leads, but I'm not sure if she gets enough air time to justify reading it just for that. It does have an unusually large cast of characters and come to think of I think she was still a baby in the first few books but she comes into her own towards the end. You might be better off going with Yawara that has a female title character.
One difference between them is that Death Note has full furigana for every kanji, so is better for intermediate learners (not really beginners, I would say as it would still be too hard), whereas the others have similar language but just no furigana so you need to be confident with your kanji and vocab.
