The attack on Salman Rushdie in western New York state Friday 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.
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