about books and stuff
I’m German, and the issue is not about getting the pronunciation right - it’s about memorizing the kana, if you will. Each word is super-short, and mostly the sound combinations don’t make any intuitive sense to me and I have nothing to hook onto for memorizing.
I studied or dabbled in quite a few languages, and they became increasingly easy to learn because they are all set in the Germanic and Romance language families (those are English, Latin, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch in that order), so the more languages I learned the easier it got because each word is always “just like that word in that other language but a bit different” so I get more and more connections. But Japanese is just 100% outside of that and each word is just a random combination of sounds to me. 
I read it with the Advanced book club, we started Oct 2020. I started studying Japanese almost 6 years ago, so that was after 3 years and a bit. I had passed N3 at that point.
No, not yet. My understanding of spoken language is slowly improving, though, so I guess in a year or two I should give it another try.
Nice! Happy to read it with you any time 
So far I only read one story by him. It’s called 飼育 and he received the Akutagawa Prize for it. I think you can only get it as part of a short story collection though.