Ghostly Profound: A Thing of Unknowable Depth

HowlRound: I have been terrified to even put down the word 幽玄. I had to ask Google to write these characters for me. According to Google Translate, yugen means “subtle and profound.” Looking at the unfamiliar characters, I would have guessed “ghostly.” For the first time in decades, I looked for the Japanese dictionary that I brought with me when I left Japan alone at age sixteen. It was on my bookshelf having survived many moves. The first definition of the word translates (roughly) as “a thing of unknowable depth,” and ironically, the second definition remains unknown to me because I don’t know the key character in it. I could only make out “infinite experience.”