It was a fun end to the book. Again, a perhaps surprising motive for a kids book - debts from betting on the horses.
I don’t remember seeing the grammar - volitional form plus とする - before reading this book. It’s meant “about to happen” or “trying to” and it’s come up a few times. We had one last example on page 138 - 逃げようとした.
As usual the “Spitz’s Illustrated Field Guide” page is much more challenging to read and made the vocab list significantly longer! Worth reading though to find out a bit more about Alan’s history.
はたして、出てきたのは奈良さんの顔だった。
Glad that the book/Sprtiz agreed it was pretty obvious who the culprit was.
うん。塾の答案用紙に目をつけるどろばうなんて、知り合いしか、考えられない。
Yes. It’s unthinkable, what kind of criminal would eye down a cram school answer sheet, only an acquaintance would.
There’s actually a definition for that form, so I guess it’s sort of a set phrase.
That sentence is a doozy though. Leaned heavily on ichi.moe to help parse it, but then also had to re-read the context as well. It’s Spritz talking, right?
I read this as the negative potential form, rather than a set phrase. Used in the negative form as part of the しか + negative form we’ve seen a few times in this book (and a lot in the first chapter of レンタルおにいちゃん).
Yes. Such a criminal (who has his eye on the cram school’s answer papers), I can only think/conclude/suspect an acquaintance.
That’d actually make a lot of sense. I thought it matched the しか～ない construction but was doubting it because of the comma placement. I should know better than to trust any comma.
