I mean, the overall story is really good in my opinion, so if people recommended it, that might maybe be more based on the story itself and not so much on the language?
That’s of course also an option. I haven’t seen the English translation so I cannot really comment on that.
The book was adapted from a stage play and it keeps a lot of the style of a stage play, which was not that uninteresting actually. So for example, person A was talked about for a while, and then the focus shifted to person B, and in between we kept getting little glimpses of person A again (who was still in the same room i.e. on stage), like “Person A is still doing this and that”. It really felt like stage directions or something.
Oh, now that I think about it, one big thing was that we did not get any inside views from anybody (as far as I remember), it was mainly descriptions of actions and situations. So really like on a stage where we are not able to read the actors’ minds, we can only see their actions. I think there is so much depth missing without that.
On top of that, the Japanese that was used was not that rich and expressive either… The first time I got annoyed by that was when the author introduced a new expression (姿を消す - to disappear (into another room)) which I found quite interesting, but the author literally used it five times over the course of three pages! (And small pages, with not too much text on them.) Also, he used quite long-winding descriptions of the characters and repeated them over and over again, e.g. something like “the man who sat in the corner reading a magazine”. Even later, when we got to know his name, he was referred to as “the man called Tom who sat in the corner reading a magazine”.
I know that other authors also have a habit of using long-ish descriptions of their characters (MORI Hiroshi 
), and they also tend to repeat words and expressions sometimes, but the frequency just killed me.
So to be fair the writing was not “really, really bad” writing but maybe a bit boring and repetitive?
I’m actually enjoying it, though I don’t love it, and I’ve been already slacking for two weeks. It’s the second time it happens with book clubs, perhaps I find the almost-daily commitment too suffocating, and if I don’t have a great interest in what I’m reading it feels like a bit of a chore. I think I will keep reading it though, but it will have to be behind schedule, at least for now. I just enjoy Satori Reader much more overall these days. I have yet to find a novel that makes me go “wow I really want to read this”, I generally get that feeling only with video games, but most of them are still rather hard to comprehend to enjoy at a comfortable pace. I’ve talked before about how much I love Final Fantasy XIV; unfortunately that one is really hard ;-; I keep swapping back and forth to grab glimpses here and there but I tire easily.
. I was playing Final Fantasy III out of nostalgia, and I didn’t find it hard at all, it was quite manageable. I haven’t touched it for a couple of weeks but I will resume it eventually.
It might be worthwile to actually mine vocabulary from the videos and put it on some SRS, it’s not actually a bad idea and seems entertaining. Some games I’d like to play myself, like FF8, but others I don’t mind watching.
Have you started on the second volume yet?