Salman Rushdie attack recalls 1991 killing of his Japanese translator

The attack on Salman Rushdie in western New York state on Friday (Aug 12) prompted renewed interest in previous attacks on people connected to his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses”, including its Japanese translator, who was killed in 1991.

The translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death at age 44 that July at Tsukuba University, northeast of Tokyo, where he had been teaching comparative Islamic culture for five years. No arrests were ever made, and the crime remains unsolved.

Igarashi had translated “The Satanic Verses” for a Japanese edition that was published after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, had ordered Muslims to kill the Indian-born British writer over the book’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.

Rushdie, 75, who went into surgery on Friday after being stabbed by an attacker in Chautauqua, New York, had said in 1991 that news of Igarashi’s death had left him feeling “extremely distressed”.

Police in Japan said at the time that they had no specific evidence linking the attack to “The Satanic Verses”. But news reports said that the novel’s Japanese publisher had received death threats from Islamic militants and that Igarashi had for a time been protected by bodyguards.

The publishing house, Shinsensha, had also faced protests at its Tokyo office in 1990, and a Pakistani citizen was arrested that year for trying to assault a promoter of the book at a news conference.

Igarashi was killed as he left his office at Tsukuba University after a day of teaching. His son, Ataru Igarashi, said years later that he had been working on translating “The Canon of Medicine”, a medieval medical textbook by Islamic physician and philosopher Ibn Sina.

Hitoshi Igarashi may be the only person to be killed because of their work with Rushdie. Several others survived attempts on their lives, including Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of “The Satanic Verses,” who was stabbed in his apartment in Milan days before the attack on Igarashi.

In July 1993, Turkish novelist Aziz Nesin, who had published a translated excerpt from “The Satanic Verses” in a local newspaper, narrowly escaped death when a crowd of militants burned down a hotel in eastern Turkey where he was staying in an attempt to kill him.

In October 1993, the Norwegian publisher of “The Satanic Verses,” William Nygaard, was shot three times outside his home in Oslo, Norway. He made a full recovery and went on to reprint the book in defiance.

As for Igarashi’s killing, the statute of limitations in the case expired in 2006, producing a general sense of disappointment that there would be no closure, or reflection on what the killing meant for the country.

But last year, police officials said they were continuing to investigate Hitoshi Igarashi’s killing in the hope that the statute of limitations might not apply if a perpetrator turned out to have fled the country.

Masako Igarashi, a high school principal and a scholar of comparative Japanese literature, said she held out hope of finding justice.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES