On a winter night at the Meiji Club, six men around the stove trade stories about their idealistic youth. Uemura tells how he went to Hokkaido to farm potatoes, lost heart in the autumn and became a beef-eating pragmatist, while the fierce Kondo mocks both camps as fallen poets.
Books mentioned in Beef and Potatoes (1)
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray: “A poet? Why yes, in those days I was a poet. I used to love reading the translation of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the one that begins 'Yamayama kasumi iriai no', and write verses of my own. Compared with today's new-style poets I'm a veteran, you know. [auto-translated]”