Both of you got the meaning of のクセに as “despite” or “though”, which is a big part of what had stumped me. I also didn’t quite get the whole middle-class / lower-class aspect of that sentence either. It’s interesting how different people get stuck on different things.

> Is the answer to this “mini-lesson” our interpretation of just the * line, or the dialogue as a whole?

I guess I didn’t really think that far ahead. I just started reading this comic, and thought this page was interesting, and I thought I would share it and maybe discuss a few of the lines. By the way, if anyone is thinking about reading it, you should be aware there is very little furigana, so looking things up takes quite a bit of time. I have been using jisho.org’s “kanji by radicals” interface, which seems to work OK.

> I’m a little confused as to why they’ve ended the first line with はよ, and not just one or the other. Can they be used together like that?

I double checked the original, and that is indeed how it is written. I don’t have a good sense of the stylistic shading of that line, but it is entirely possible the grammar is nonstandard. I looked in my sentence deck and on Eijiro and couldn’t find any other examples of “はよ、” (with the comma). If you search without the comma you get too many results and all the ones I looked at were really はよく or something else.

> I actually had more trouble with the third line for some reason

That third line is interesting as well. I wonder what is going on with the katakana for モチロン. I double-checked that also, and indeed it is written using katakana. Anyway my take on the overall structure of that line is there is an implicit “and” in there at the beginning, so it’s like “shut out by the banks, and of course the big-name consumer financing [companies].”

The scan I found had “abandoned by consumer credit big-shots such as banks.” I’m not sure where “such as” is coming from in their version. Could that kind of meaning come from the pattern AはB? I would be interested to know if anyone knows of any other examples of usages like that. That pattern is so basic, it’s difficult to research.

> To me it feels something like: “As for banks, well naturally these are blacklisted guys that have been abandoned by big name consumer finance (and therefore they can’t turn to the banks, the banks aren’t an option for them)”

I like that, but there is something odd about switching the subject / topic from the banks to the customers in the middle of the sentence. I looked at some examples of はもちろん over on Eijiro and found some useful examples.

It looks like there is an idiomatic usage along the lines of “let alone” or “never mind”. The best examples I found were these:

ここで十分寒いのだから、北海道はもちろんのことです。
It’s cold enough here, let alone in Hokkaido.

アラビア語を話すことはもちろん読むこともできない
can’t read Arabic let alone speak it

That leads to a reading of something like, “Never mind the banks, these people have been abandoned by consumer finance.” So it’s sort of like, “These people couldn’t even get a retail line of credit at a department store, let alone anything from a bank.” So in that reading banks are at a higher level than consumer finance in general.

Another example I found is along the lines of my original theory, and it gives an “as well as” reading of はもちろん.

テニスはもちろん卓球もやる
play tennis as well as table tennis

So that makes it “This lot was shut out by banks as well as big-name consumer finance [companies].” That particular example seems to fit fairly well, but it does have も in there, which our sentence doesn’t have. Also I have to put the “companies” part in brackets because I’m not totally sure it’s really there in the original.

Finally, there is an example of a “not only/not just” construction involving はもちろん.

当社への貢献はもちろんのこと、彼の誠実さや、家族思いの人柄、そして素晴らしいユーモアのセンスは高く評価されていました。
He was highly valued not only for his contribution to the company but for his integrity, his commitment to his family and his wonderful sense of humor

That one has the list of “but also” conditions set off by commas just like our sentence, but there is a や in there also. Overall I haven’t found an example exactly like what we have here, but in any case it looks like はもちろん has a bunch of idiomatic usages that are good to know.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by  jkl.

> What does the scanlation for that line say, anyway? Does it references classes or just “ordinary people” or similar?

The one I found said, “Being under average, yet still living at the average level.” After reading that and thinking about it, I came up with “Lower class people living like they were middle class.”

I did some more research and found other, more specific words for “middle-class”– 中流階級の and 中産階級の. So maybe it’s more like “living beyond their means” in a general sense. The idea is the same though. I think he is saying these people buy stuff they can’t afford, end up owing money all over town, and then have to resort to borrowing money from black-market lenders to pay their other debts.

Your take on it is interesting as well though. It sounds like you are reading it as, “Living comfortably in spite of being poor,” and the loan shark’s role is facilitating that, even when other lenders won’t help. While trying to find evidence to help clear up this line, I found yet a third possible interpretation.

It turns out 人並みに暮らす is an idiom that means “make a decent living.” If it means that here, then the line might mean something like “Making a decent living despite being below-average [in ability/intelligence/etc.].” In other words, he is talking about fools with money they don’t deserve.