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Student's AI Tool Translates Murakami's New Novel Into Mandarin in Four Hours for Under $2
A 21-year-old Chinese literature student built an AI tool that rendered Haruki Murakami's newest novel into Mandarin within four hours of its Tokyo release, at a cost of about 13 RMB.
The student, who works under the pseudonym Ping Ming, built the tool he calls "Wenyi" on the DeepSeek AI model. Instead of translating the book in a single pass, the program was instructed to work through the text in chunks while maintaining an evolving glossary of proper nouns and overlapping context.
The output appeared four hours after The Tale of KAHO, Murakami's latest novel, went on sale in Tokyo in July. The cost of producing the Chinese version came to 13 RMB, or roughly 1.90 USD.
Murakami is known for surrealist, magical-realism works including Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, and his voice is widely regarded as difficult to carry into other languages. Chinese readers have typically waited more than a year for an official Mandarin edition of a new book by the Japanese author.
The AI translation reached underground digital libraries almost immediately, moving outside the copyright and licensing channels that govern official editions.
Human translators who were simultaneously preparing their own Mandarin versions of the novel dropped that work after judging the AI output to be unusually accurate.